A very interesting observation.. I tend to agree that the sheer number of frameworks and libraries makes programming into coping with flaws or badly documented "features". The other thing is that the programming world is much like an archipelago, where different islands develop their own programming culture, like .NET or JEE or PHP. And the islands are floating apart: It will become increasingly difficult to establish the better choice because of long learning curves. It is important to admit there are other cultures out there, that even might do a better job in particular areas. However, as much as frameworks get more sophisticated and cater to the programmers ideal of elegant and abstract formulation of the code, Managed Code, Reflection and even OO have a overhead cost in cycles and bytes, particularly when scaling up. As a 45+ programmer I sometimes weep about "elegant" code that drives your machine to the edge but only does a fairly simple job. Stacking API's and frameworks does certainly not always contribute to efficient and simple executables. Sometimes we just need to get back to the root, or at least understand what happens in the machine when we use a certain framework or library. For programmers that will remain a challenge, and fortunately will force us to reflect occasionally...