[EricE]

"I guess what I want to say, if you compare writing actual "business logic", it is still about as difficult as it was in the 90s. We can do fancier things by leveraging libraries (sometimes included in the programming languages), but that's it. In fact I even suspect that people in the 90s were more productive in writing actual business logic, because there was less distractions from the fancy technology (such as web)."

This has been my experience! I'm shocked whenever I need to automate some business process my organization alway starts at ground zero - what should the base technologies languages be? database server? authentication?

Seriously?!?! Why isn't there "workflow as a service" by now?