[lisper]

Yeah, this. The simplicity of early computers came with a cost: they couldn't really do very much. You can recapture the essential parts of that simplicity today by, for example, firing up a Python interpreter, which is just as easy to learn as BASIC and much more capable. You can live inside a Python prompt for a very long time before you really start to hit the limits. (Or, even better IMHO, inside a Lisp prompt :-) But the fact of the matter is that the technology that makes modern web sites possible is complicated, and there is just no way around that.