Totally agree. Nothing ever really lived up to that early promise of BASIC / 6502 assembler on a BBC micro 30-odd years ago. The elegant simplicity has vanished under a pile of self-inflicted barely functional complexity. For example, web frameworks (e.g. Vaadin, not that I want to pick on that one project) are pouring massive effort into recreating the desktop widgets we had 15 years ago in a web browser. Stale, hugely complicated, laggy, connection-bound, insecure web apps whose benefits never justified the effort, IMO. Just write the thick client and move on. In fact, if it can't be done on a 2MHz 8 bit CPU in 64K, it's not worth doing...