There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.
Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform
The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer