For better or worse, I have a broad set of painful experiences from which to draw comparisons: PHP, Java (Swing, Spring, OSGI, RMI, Nuxeo), Fortran 77, Managed

For better or worse, I have a broad set of painful experiences from which to draw comparisons: PHP, Java (Swing, Spring, OSGI, RMI, Nuxeo), Fortran 77, Managed C++ circa 2004, "modern" Pearl, and even some remarkably awkward Python. My chief complaint is that it takes less effort to grab an open compiler and get to work on 20 y.o. Fortran (for instance) than it takes to spin up the whole stack that this relatively trivial MVC app requires[-]. Some years ago I would have had to buy the Lahey Fujitsu Fortran compiler, but those days are over as far as I can tell. Substantive greenfield projects (any platform) are marvelous by comparison; not even in the same ballpark. [-] Note that most of the platform pain goes away if you're a fungible MS dev, but then there's a more subtle and insidious pain for you to deal with down the road.