It's this kind of intellectual ugliness that makes the teacher in me hang my head in shame. How could we be managing to produce a whole generation of programmers who actually buy into that stuff? And it's not as if it's a fad that's getting better. If anything it's getting worse. Somehow we've made it laudible to go to any lengths to avoid writing a line of real code and to run as far away from hardware as we can. That and worship at the alter of "code reuse" have created a world where if one abstraction is good, then 432 must be better. If a symbol appears that's not defined in 17 different places all surrounded by #ifdef's, then that's not "professional." Everyone is afraid to point out the nudity of the XML monarch for fear of being branded as one afraid of change.
I humbly extend my apologies for any of this that might have been promulgated by any of my former students :( \end{soapbox} BLS