I've been lucky to write at least one small application per year, although most of my work is now on the creative side: books, videos, web pages, and such. So

I've been lucky to write at least one small application per year, although most of my work is now on the creative side: books, videos, web pages, and such. So I find myself getting "cold" and then coming back into it. The thing about taking a week to set up a dev environment is spot on. It's completely insane that it should take a week of work just to sit down and write a for-next loop or change a button's text somewhere. The problem with programming is simple: it's full of programmers. So every damn little thing they do, they generalize and then make into a library. Software providers keep making languages do more -- and become correspondingly more complex. When I switched to Ocaml and F# a few years ago, I was astounded at how little I use most of the crap clogging up my programming system. I also found that while writing an app, I'd create a couple dozen functions. I'd use a couple dozen more from the stock libraries. And that was it. 30-40 symbols in my head and I was solving real-world problems making people happy. Compare that to the mess you can get into just getting started in an environment like C++. Crazy stuff. There's also a serious structural problem with OOP itself. Instead of hiding complexity and providing black-box components to clients, we're creating semi-opaque non-intuitive messes of "wires". A lot of what I'm seeing people upset about in the industry, from TDD to stuff like this post, has its roots in OOP. Having said all that and agreeing with the author, I'm a bit lost as to just what the heck he is ranting on about. I look forward to seeing more real tangible stuff -- I understand he's working on it. Best of luck.