The NES Homebrew Scene
Nowdays, it's impossible to do modern programming without relying on millions of lines of other people's code. It's frameworks and libraries all the way down.<p>On the NES however, every line of code is yours. There's no such thing as libraries, operating systems, or frameworks. They don't exist. It's refreshing.<p>One of the big problems of modern programming is how easy it is to add complexity. As Charles Moore once said:<p>>"Simplify the problem you've got or rather don't complexify it. I've done it myself, it's fun to do. You have a boring problem and hiding behind it is a much more interesting problem. So you code the more interesting problem and the one you've got is a subset of it and it falls out trivial. But of course you wrote ten times as much code as you needed to solve the problem that you actually had."<p>It's easy to add complexity on modern systems, but it's hard on the NES. The programming too clunky; it's too much work to anything but simple things. For that reason, it's far more common to simplify the problem and reduce features rather than add them. It's a wonderful thing.