"How did they develop their skill? The best film makers through the years usually seem to have learned their art in comparatively primitive circumstances, often in other countries with a limited movie industry. And in recent years the most important things we have been learning about programming seem to have originated with people who did not have access to very large computers. The moral of this story, it seems to me, is that we should make use of the idea of limited resources in our own education. We can all benefit by doing occasional "toy" programs, when artificial restrictions are set up, so that we are forced to push our abilities to the limit. We shouldn't live in the lap of luxury all the time, since that tends to make us lethargic. The art of tackling miniproblems with all our energy will sharpen our talents for the real problems, and the experience will help us to get more pleasure from our accomplishments on less restricted equipment."

So true. Robert Rodriguez filmed El Mariachi with almost no resources. It's why the demoscene produced - and still produces - such amazing creations within its self-imposed strict limits. It's one of the reasons why the Raspberry Pi is so popular and why you see the most beautiful ARM assembly on the Gameboy.

And conversely I think it's why Web development is collapsing under the weight of too many shiny things. It's lethargic and living in the lap of luxury. I watched a video the other day of AirBNB talking about the evolution of its Web site. The 2008 version was fine: Rails, a database and dynamic page output. The 2015 version was insane: Rails, React, Node, all sorts of dependencies, some stuff I'd never heard of but that the speaker assured was good, complex mobile optimization when you could instead, you know, just write lean and mean mobile-friendly HTML.

Limit yourself instead and see what happens - the results might just be awesome.