[ikll]

I don't agree that it's THAT hard.

I used to work with WebForms and Cocoa (before iPhone) back when enterprise was completely allergic to web. Not only those tools were faster, but the development process itself was quicker and less traumatic than it is today. Interfaces were crude, but snappier. All grey, and users preferred using the return key to move between fields. And we could knock a calculator app in a few hours.

The landscape was much more diverse too, a lot of women, and older folks (40/50+) coming from Fox Pro, Clipper or even COBOL (mostly on WebForms). I don't know what happened to those people when everyone moved to web tech. A lot of people my age moved to backend because they find HTML/CSS/JS too hard. Cocoa guys moved to iOS. I'm on frontend + iOS now.

For the enterprise shops around here I know it all went to hell when both business AND developers started pushing modern multi-platform development: Qt, Java, Adobe, Cordova, you name it. Suddenly apps became crappier and a lot of people got pushed away from development because it was becoming too hard for them. After that everything became browser based. Mobile was weird for a while (too much Cordova), but it later settled on React Native.

I know WebForms (and Interface Builder!) might look primitive and limited to today's developers, and I might be looking trough rose-colored glasses, but I remember when it was enough to build 90% of the apps people need, you don't need John Carmack or dealing with the audio buffer directly. Since this tech still exists, I can't see why that's not the case anymore :/