[mikewarot]

Programming peaked about the time of Visual Basic 6, Microsoft Office, and Borland's Delphi. Normal folks, especially domain experts, could use a GUI form designer, then add a few methods to wire up the behavior they needed.

We haven't had anything close since the Web came, and replaced the clean Win32 interface on a single system with an ever churning mess of mostly usable, but intermittent and unreliable, network layers, http protocols, and way too much javascript. Then of course there was the enshittification of IE6, and the browser wars, the demise of flash, and the rest of it.

All that extra code and muck served to eat up performance and all the hardware and network bandwidth that could be thrown at it.