But at least, then, I could write code, run it, make changes, and run it again! And see results! Quickly! My main objection to this "future world" is the vast number of layers of abstraction that you need to fight through just to get your first result.

As you can surely guess from my biases and opinions, my happiest engineering projects are those that only require me, my thinkpad, emacs, some man pages, and a C++ compiler. :D And those are the ones I do in my spare time.