I find it shocking how so many old-timers fail to see how amazing the web is in terms of being the first de-facto cross-platform cross-media technology, and instead lament the loss of powerful proprietary GUI toolkits. I mean sure portable HTML/CSS/Javascript is incredibly difficult and it's full of warts, but it's pretty minor considering the accessibility of something that can be accessed on any device running any OS, by people with any disability. Yeah, so the win32 API was more elegant for throwing up a toolbar GUI, big fucking whoop; it's like Louis CK's bit about complaining about the Internet on an airplane, total blindness to the accomplishments in front of us.
I like the promise of the web, but many web apps just feel janky compared to their native counterparts, much like Java never felt quite right compared to native apps. But this time, nobody seems to really care, because it runs in the browser.
Plus, re-inventing things in the browser passes for innovation ("ssh client in JS!") around here.
Demoscene[1] is a good example of this. Back in the day when people wanted to create great looking audiovisual works of art, they had to program them for the computer. There were no movie/3D/CGI editors to do the job with. The whole scene revolved around the technical limitations and beating them. People formed groups which competed against others by creating ever-more stunning effects with more and more content on the screen. Now, new people wonder why do people bother doing the art by programming some obscure old machine? Sure it would be easier to use Sony Vegas for visuals and FL Studio for audio? But hese people miss the point. Some people are not driven to play with these things in order to create art. They are driven by their desire to do creative problem solving. These days the scene has lost it's appeal in public because there's nothing special in stunning graphics on screen. And very few people really care about the fact that some of the works are created within very tight technical constraints[2][3].
All this is gone and "dead" though. Not only demoscene, but the spirit of ceative problem solving within technical constraints. This is the problem I have.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Another interesting domain in which creative problem solving rules the game is computer security. But it too is going away once we move away from C and C++ based infrastructure.
This has always happened, it will always continue to happen, but the creativity will move elsewhere. It won't be too long before people are lamenting the loss of computer programming almost entirely, but by then the creative people will have moved on to, say, synthetic biology or some new system that can be 'hacked'.
Web development is, for the most part, write-once run-anywhere, from an x86-on-steroids desktop PC to a pocket-sized RISC device (even for people with very small pockets). Frameworks abstract away a lot of complexity and a modern developer is more of a builder than a wizard, and this is a good thing. If you had told those 80s programmers that programming in the future would have been less like electronic brain surgery and more like building with Lego, they would have, I think, been quite pleased at the notion. Thirty years of software engineering research and practise have gone into making it this easy to build stuff. I wonder if perhaps the fact that development now looks pretty similar to development 30 years ago causes people to overlook just how much has changed; it's also true that despite things getting easier, there are still plenty of frustrations in modern development that a programmer from the 80s would recognise.