That's so true. There was an article on HN recently on how advanced desktop app development tools were many years ago; how quickly you could build a fully functional and quite advanced application. When you have that background, the current state of JS resembles C on DOS in the early nineties. With the exception that there are far, far more complications that could have been be abstracted so that developers can focus on developing the app and not the underlying stack.

Nostalgia is overrated.

You can with a 10 line HTML file and linking a few CDNs make an interactive application that can reach 1 billion people with no install and no buffer overflows. That's magic. The 90s wish they could do that.

I could write a CAD system in the 90s with 10 lines of C and linking a few libraries :)

Well, given sufficiently good libraries everything can be written in 10 lines of C.

It depends what you create. If it's business apps for your customers, they might not care about availability to 1 billion people, but will appreciate several other things (such as rapid modifications) that more often than not are not so trivial to implement in modern web apps.

Could you point us to said article? A few keywords to search, at least. Thanks.

I'm sorry, now when I'm re-reading the said article, it looks like what I meant were some related comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13650730 Several people complain that the voids space after Delphi[1] has never been filled in with something that would come close in the speed and easiness of development of desktop applications. [1] not that it doesn't exist, but it doesn't count anymore, mostly because of its exorbitant price

I can't find it either, just spent over 30 minutes searching.