Plus ça change. :) I was just reading an article ("APL since 1978", [1]), which recounts the complaints of mainframe programmers when microcomputers were introduced in the mid-80s, because of how much harder it became to design application interfaces:
> Worse, the technical skill required to write applications suddenly increased dramatically. You needed to know about networks, how to deal with the poor reliability of shared files on a LAN — or how to construct client/server components to achieve the security, performance, and reliability that you needed. User interfaces, which were so simple on the mainframe, became an absolute nightmare as an endless procession of new GUI frameworks and UI “standards” appeared and then faded away.
Anvil has basically created VB6 for the web but uses Python for the code-behind-the-forms. It can't do everything, but on the surface looks like a pretty valiant effort: https://anvil.works/
