Maybe he's messy, but nobody pays the janitor millions of dollars to clean up everyone else's messes even if they tell themselves he's important. Rather, they pay the people who made it worth cleaning up the building in the first place.

It's obvious, for example, that we don't need titanium cupholders in a car, but maybe titanium rods _are_ necessary to achieve a particular level of performance.

But in software, you'll see programmers doing the ethical equivalent of putting in titanium cupholders "because it's the best" or whatever, with no regard to the cost.

In my experience, a 10x programmer is a 1x programmer who knows where the value is and spends their time on that.

It's poor code design, poor code management.

It's more like:

- irresponsible house developer builds house very fast and very cheaply but he doesn't care about safety or design

- then building is beginning to collapse and tennants have to hire another developer to fix mistakes of previous developer.

They must pay twice! One time - for creation of the building. Second time - for fixing.

I have a webapp that I maintain for a family member written, by me, in 2005. It was using WebWork (which became Struts 2) and still is, and I am trying to move it to something more modern in bits and pieces. But it's requiring me to learn a lot, which I am trying to do in the limited time I have.

At my work we do way more modern thing, but so much so that I'm not able to do any UI stuff since they use tech I'm not "hit the ground running" capable of doing. But I'm trying.

I hope I'm not abrasive however.

Which language has standard library small enough that people can memorize the whole thing?

My own web projects in java 15 years ago were coded in java and glued by JavaScript (Rhino) with templates in JavaScript, which were compiled into bytecode for speed: fast, secure, simple, 10x faster to code.