I can't help but wonder how much of the new web metaphors revolve around sharing state and replicating GUI features that were largely solved in the mid 1980s.

I can't help but wonder how much of the new web metaphors revolve around sharing state and replicating GUI features that were largely solved in the mid 1980s. I just spent days implementing some JWT and OAuth code that largely reproduces what session cookies did in the 90s (while fixing security issues, I realize that). I've spent weeks implementing AngularJS code that basically does what a software transactional memory (STM) does, only with ugly syntax. I've spent my career learning how to get an environment set up and transpile code (on many platforms, not just the web). I may be getting very proficient at these things, but in the pit of my stomach I know it's all going the way of the dodo and that I am a glorified punchcard operator, because I've been through code deprecation before and know it's inevitable. I think the solution to all of this is to get back to declarative programming and idempotence, which will largely eliminate the trap of front end scripting we've fallen into. We need to switch from the client/server metaphor to trusted and untrusted computing and move to a p2p topology. This would be better served by the stdin/stdout/stderr stream processing of UNIX where each component does one thing well without side effects in a hierarchy of concerns where language is largely irrelevant and we focus more on the data, probably JSON streams processed with jq or something like it. Views would just be thin wrappers over black boxes handling business logic. Right now all of the glory is going to top-down development and processes like Agile/Scrum, but if we look to history, most of the interesting innovations happened in bottom-up egalitarian R&D. Now get off my lawn..