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99% of the programming projects I see on github, reddit, HN, etc. are just programming tools for other programmers. "I made a data-processing library for the ButtFuck framework" "I made a fancy-pants syntax highlighter for Fartlang in vim" "I made a utility that tells you if your config file is blah blah blah" 10 billion stars on github with a bunch of badges and emojis of course. All this effort put into programmer tools and for what? So they can make more programming tools, I suppose?
The gods of programming have blessed mankind with the means of producing the most complex, ornate, beautiful machines they can dream of as a single individual without needing to worry about material or labor costs, safety or regulatory concerns, etc. and all programmers can imagine is "what if I made my shell a bit prettier." What a waste.
P.S. This is just me ranting, I know some people do make cool things, you're gonna have to just let me cook on this one
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Personally I suspect it's something to do with the fact that computers these days have the power that a single programmer would be hard pressed to utilise fully, seems like back in the day of 8-bit and 16-bit machines and I guess a bit in the early 32-bit era it was a real challenge to even get a rotating 3D cube (or something that looks a bit like it) on screen let alone all the crazy effects that the demoscene came out with and thus came the motivation to overcome that challenge.
Anything a single programmer could reasonably do in terms of spare time wouldn't actually be that challenging to do (in part thanks to all of the open source tooling that has been built) and in fact probably would have the computing resources left over to just write the entire fuggin thing in JavaScript and still have it run reasonably well.
To create something cool relative to what the major software houses are able to produce feels overly ambitious for a single programmer and I, like other anons have mentioned ITT and elsewhere, I get bored and demotivated just thinking about projects that wouldn't pale in comparison. Instead though I've taken to trying to learn more forgotten ways of doing things, though no one in their right mind would tackle a modern project using raw x64 assembly, I've quite enjoyed learning about it and making basic programs in it feels quite rewarding in a way that writing a single line of deeply abstracted and library heavy Python isn't.
I contribute to OpenStreetMap
>>24708>I think they do that just to filter normies.You caught me. Is copy and pasting build commands from the readme that hard? Getting asked for free tech support sucks. The average person is trained by big companies that if they complain loudly and aggressively enough they'll get a personal answer from some underpaid helpdesk prole in the third world, and they take this entitled attitude to the maintainers of open source passion projects. Asking people to build it themselves guarantees a minimum level of competency. I'll package software for distros I use, but I am NEVER releasing a windows binary ever again unless I'm getting paid for it.
>>24708>My issue is that these fuckers think making an installer is simple impossiblethat's because we have package managers. installers are Windows retardation. if you were to mess with a Windows program from source you'd have the same issue. worse even, because most Windows projects use Visual Studio
>>25502Modern PCs are enormously complex in a way that home computers of the 80s and 90s weren't. Nobody works straight to the metal anymore unless they absolutely need to, and it's because doing so in a way that genuinely yields better performance is completely untenable for real-world applications.