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I was trying to be an infrequent user of OpenGL. People were totally not understanding why amn't I "just writing a shader".

Modern 3D environment is hostile to infrequent developers now that drawing a simple sphere suddently needs a page length blob of code. Or a "model". Exported from "3D editor".

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I agree that graphics programming has become more and more hostile to infrequent users over the years. Comparing the setup boilerplate needed to draw a triangle from OpenGL to Vulkan is just horrifying.

I frequently imagine the terror that junior computer graphics devs encounter when they realize you can't just "draw lines" in OpenGL.

...and there's no good reason why you can't, other than that in some iteration of API, frequent developers could not imagine why would anybody need that.

Isn't it because everything is represented as triangles? That is fundamental to how openGL works I believe.

Everything can be represented in terms of everything else. It's a matter of caring, or not caring, about convenience.

Oh dear lord yes. I was struggling to just plot some points on a plane 15 years ago, something I'd done trivially in class years prior. I finally complained to a friend, and that's how I learned about python and pygame. Damn near changed my life.

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