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.

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.

One of the big problems of modern programming is how easy it is to add complexity. As Charles Moore once said:

>"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."

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.