This is a rant, but I feel the author's hurt, and it helps me a bit to read it. Here's my story, for whoever wants to read it. I started programming for the w

This is a rant, but I feel the author's hurt, and it helps me a bit to read it. Here's my story, for whoever wants to read it. I started programming for the web in the late 90s. At first, it was a jumble of P languages (JSP, ASP, PHP) and a database connection, kicking out HTML, with an odd bit of javascript. It got more organized, with libraries and cookbooks. Then, an interesting thing happened. In 2004, the java web programming cookbook became obsolete, but everything was a framework. Struts was the first one. Then, an explosion. Struts, Struts 2, Spring MVC, Tiles, Wicket, Tapestry, followed by DI frameworks like Spring MVC, Pico, Google Guice, and lots and lots of ORM frameworks, Hibernate, iBatis, JPA… Programming, for me, became miserable, as in, I didn't want to be a programmer anymore, because everything was insanely complicated, and not in a good way. Not complicated like fascinating data structures and algorithms, more like, complicated in that it is insanely difficult to write a to-do list. As another college of mine (who passed a notoriously difficult CS curriculum at Berkeley) said, "reading about spring DI makes me want to turn off my computer and go home." Rails, to me, was truly wonderful. Even rails was a bit tricky to pick up, since I was used to a very loose way of doing things (Java, Servlets, JDBC, and use a library and/or figure out everything else as it comes up). But it was worth it, it kept things organized, and most importantly, simple was simple, and enjoyable. I went through a blissful time where things were good for me again, and now? I haven't felt this way since 2005, but it's been 10 years, so yeah, I guess we're due for another massive disruption. There is a ticker on the web counting the days since the most recent release of a javascript framework. Ember, Angular, React… you know, they're the product of very intelligent people, but simple isn't simple anymore. Remember "agile development with rails?", which fictitiously took us through a meeting with a client where we built software right there in the moment? Long gone. I've said this a few times here on HN - I expect all this to be swept off the coffee table with a great crashing sound. Just as I had no idea rails was in my future, something else like that is in my future too. Right now, I wish I'd had the courage (maybe even the anger) to stick with the older stack and get things done, and refuse to get caught up in something so chaotic. No, that doesn't mean refuse to change, it means refuse to change unless it makes a lot of sense. My tenuous prediction is that isomorphic ruby (and other languages) transpiled to javascript will change web programming so much that the Javascript framework chaos will most likely end with a very different and unanticipated approach.