But programming with restrictions like that will make you a better programmer. Nothing brings out creativity better than a limiting environment.
This is so true as a life principle!
I once read a book about the development of laser guided bombs [1], and in it it talked about how Texas Instruments made the first viable prototype [2] on a shoe-string budget even though they were competing against a large government contractor with a huge budget.
Because of the budgetary constraints, TI couldn't afford multi-million dollar wind tunnels for testing, so they built scale models of the bomb and dropped them into swimming pools, performing mathematics transforms on the results using the drag coefficients of water vs air. They came up with a bunch of other innovations as well, such as the shuttlecock seeker head and made a superior product that vastly outperformed the high-budget contractor.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Choice-Development-Precision-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paveway
Tools are, simply put, devices that increase a user's leverage.
We live in a world full of tools capable of leveraging against life. We also live in a world with individuals and groups who - for whatever reasons - choose to use that leverage.
We can't get rid of tools like this. They are very straightforward inventions, especially as technical knowledge increases. The simplest nuclear fission reactor is a bomb. That does not make nuclear fission fundamentally worthless, and whether you agree that knowledge about it is a "good" or not, that knowledge is not going to simply disappear.
> choosing to believe the claim that killing those people will save lives alters neither the purpose nor MO of the tool.
How a tool is used does not change what it is or what it does. It does, however, define the purpose. If the purpose of killing someone is to prevent that individual from taking another life - or several other lives - then the purpose of the tool used is to save lives. The goal for perfecting a tool that is to be used for that purpose is to minimize the amount of lives taken, and damage done. That means a "better" bomb takes fewer lives, saving more.
If you choose to believe that an individual taking action against the life of another has not forfeit his/her own right to live, then you might consider this tool to have no legitimate purpose. Frankly, I disagree, and hope you will reconsider.
With PGMs you can take out a bridge with pinpoint accuracy in the middle of the night and nobody dies at all (directly, at least).
Also, maybe creativity isn't the same as being a good programmer. Creativity may get you out of a bind or into a new area, but I think being a good programmer is founded on many mundane characteristics, such as consistency and ability to conform to others.
In another reading, absence of limitations would be limiting, still, which would be paradox.