I think because professional artists can’t typically make their software tools. Whereas engineers could in theory make their own tools. Naturally few do in practice though as tech has become far too large and specialized. But our roots are where our values and ideals come from.
If I start to work on a tool, then I cannot work anymore on what I actually wanted to do. And it just so happens ... that this is exactly what I did and I can just say, it usually takes way longer than the most pessimistic estimate one can come up with, so yes, one can decide to switch careers and try to get funding to (re)build what is not offered to acceptable conditions (but in my case the tool simply did not exist, though).
Just like an artist can switch career, study CS, build on his own a tool a professional company build with a team over years - and then someday work with his tool to acomplish his original work. In (simplified) theories, lots of things are possible ..
> But for some reasons professional programmers are judged under a much higher moral standard
Not in the real world. Most programmers who are trying to get a job done won’t avoid CUDA or AWS or other tools just to avoid “contributing to a monopoly”. When responsible programmers have a job to do and tools are available to help with the job, they get used.
A programmer who avoids mainstream tools on principle is liable to get surpassed by their peers very quickly. I’ve only met a few people like this in industry and they didn’t last very long trying to do everything the hard way just to avoid tools from corporations or monopolies or open source that wasn’t pure enough for their standards.
It’s only really in internet comment sections that people push ideological purity like this.
Tool choice of artists has close to 0 impact on people interacting with final work. Choices made by programmers are amplified through the users of produced software.
> But for some reasons professional programmers are judged under a much higher moral standard.
I believe the key word there is "professional" -- one of the challenges of a venue like HN is the professional engineers and the less-professional ones interact from worldviews and use cases so distinct that they may as well be separate universes. In other spaces, we wouldn't let a top doctor have to explain very basic concepts about the commercial practice of medicine to an amateur "skeptic" and yet so many discussions on HN degenerate along just these lines.
On the other hand, it's that very same inclusiveness and generally high discourse in spite of that wide expanse which make HN such a special community, so I'm not sure what to conclude besides this unfortunate characteristic being a necessary "feature, not a bug" of the community. There's no way around it that wouldn't make the community a lesser place, I think.
But for some reasons professional programmers are judged under a much higher moral standard.