[codingdave]

Even in those years, the client/server model was the norm. Except for people using MS Access, or similar fiascos, there was always a centralized data store.

That doesn't invalidate the claim that scripting is dying. Sure, us tech folk can (and do) script all kinds of things, even even more so the Enterprise IT world, who practically lives and dies by powershell. But back in the 90s in particular, there were such a thing as "power users", who would script the crap out of their systems. That really doesn't exist so much anymore. Now people in that grey area between end users and the coders are more likely to be professional business analysts. The days of a true end user also creating their own custom scripts to merge data and functions from disparate apps is getting rare.

(Keep in mind, HN is an entire community of edge cases... of course we all can spit out exceptions to this trend.)

Now, I do not think this is a bad thing. On the contrary, most of those people were very hard to support, and the ones who did it well and were easy to support often ended up moving into IT/Analyst roles anyway. I think we are in a better place today, with a much larger population of coders and analysts, so the end users can just tell us what they need, then focus on the actual jobs.

But the claim that end user scripting is dying... Yep, I do agree with that much.