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> I think if you don't rely on memory but examine the history as Jonathan Edwards has done, you would be surprised to find that the late 1990's was, indeed, a big cliff in terms of application development innovation. The phase change was later, and it wasn't so much a cliff in innovation but a change in focus. There are plenty of programmers “using languages and tools designed for simplicity of learning and use in solving relatively pedestrian problems” still, and plenty of things being built to support them—they're the people doing CRUD apps in Ruby/Rails or building utilities for simple problems in Python that, as Edwards described being historically the case, the people doing “systems programming” continuously look down on. (There's also a bigger huge group of people doing what is more like what was actually described as application programming historically, that is, solving relatively pedestrian problems in languages designed for industrial use rather than ease of learning, like the people building the guts of enterprise applications that don't require scale, and are largely CRUD plus business rules, using C# now, or the people doing LOB apps in any of a variety of [often proprietary] languages historically.) > Before the web was popularized, designing a layout meant a using a simple layout tool. One might argue that the complexity of design and the complexity of programming are different things, or one might observe that graphical UI builders exist for the Web (including as part of platforms designed specifically to support “application programming" for the Web), and that people doing the less sexy kinds of programming use them all the time. |