[travisgriggs]

To me, what makes this so obvious with the web platform is the bureacratic nature of developing for it. To do anything meaningful, you have to bring three departments together (html, css, and javascript). Each is a very different language designed for a different guild of practitioners. You even have the interdepartment turf wars, even if one single person is manning all 3 departments, of which department should accomplish any given task. And each department/platform/language has exteded their capabilities over time to give them more reach to participate in problem solving formerly left to others.

Thanks for your paper btw. I did 20 years of Smalltalk. I came to view Smalltalk programming more like biological culture manipulation (you had a dish of live objects that you morphed into the result you wanted), whereas the conventional file->syntax->executable employed by most development systems is more akin to the industrial factory pipeline of assembling products from raw goods.

During those younger years, money mattered. Tools were sold on the premise that they reduced or mitigated the various costs inherint with employing programmers. And then... around the late 90s, that just kind of dropped from the discussion. As quantitave easing made money available to speculate with and hitting it big with the software that was "eating the world", things like web programming burgeoned with very little thought about "does this make it cheaper".

[pjmlp]

You can still get Dreamweaver today. :)

https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html