I had a similar experience in my youth (just replace the MSX with a C64). The author is right when he says that programming a PC (either in DOS or Windows) was

I had a similar experience in my youth (just replace the MSX with a C64). The author is right when he says that programming a PC (either in DOS or Windows) was non obvious; but once you realized that the best way was to use a spreadsheet or a database engine, you could get a lot done quite easily. Those tools may not be as generic as Python or Perl, but you could program whole applications in a fraction of the time. As for the web, I think it is still harder than it could be, and the browsers make it more difficult every day, since they put more and more restrictions when opening a local page.