Dick you know I have lots of respect for you vast experience in this field and love hearing your experience, but here I feel there is some kind of miscommunication going on.

I am not sure if there is really any disagreement here. Let me take a few examples.

You seem to think that I was directing "cranking out code by the pound" towards you, but that was never directed towards you. It was written before you read the article.

Your original response assumed that I wanted to rewrite everything from scratch over and over again. I clarified that, no in fact I wouldn't want to do that either. I am not putting any of that on you. It is a large point on the writer to try to communicate their ideas clearly, and I may not have done a smashing job at that.

You may also be a bit too focused on my emphasis on programming languages. Yes, of course I know they are just tools. My point was simply that when choosing tools, I may prefer picking a better language over say a more advanced IDE. Yes of course the situation will dictate the specifics.

But I think you can agree with me that numerous problems don't have a silver bullet solution. They don't have the perfect combination of specific tools which solves the problem best. There are a variety of choices which can get you to your goal with similar efficiency and outcomes.

People build great solutions in all sorts of programming languages and with all sorts of external tooling whether Emacs of Visual Studio.

And you can build great solutions which are fairly complex and great solutions which are quite simple. I am just clarifying in this story, that I lean towards simplicity. That is my personal preference.

To me this almost a bit like articulating why you like Art Deco over say Baroque. It is as much an aesthetic choice as an engineering choice.

But if we are to talk engineering, I guess you could say that it is similar reasons why I might like the thinking behind the AK47 assault rifle. Sure something like the M16 was far more advanced and accurate. And since you are Vietnam veteran, you probably know this far better than me, but my understanding was that the early M16s was so prone to jamming that there was actually people in the US army who would have preferred the AK47, due to its better reliability.

You could see this with a lot of Soviet stuff. Look at Soyuz. Far behind technologically compared to say the Space Shuttle and many other American space innovations. But there was a certain kind of beauty in its simplicity, reliability and low cost which the Shuttle could never match.

You can of course take this too far. I think e.g. SpaceX is an great example of finding a sensibile balance. It is a blend of well proven old technology and of breaking new ground. But in sum something like the Falcon9 is a lot simpler than a lot of the competition. Using lots of off the shelf parts rather than highly specialized components. E.g. I believe the austronout seats are not bespoke but seats used by racer car drivers. The computer hardware is much the same as what we use. They went the Google way of using lots of unreliable cheap hardware but build a lot of redundance to make it safe.