I think he's got a point in that there was a simplicity in the past that was useful, but the counterpoint is we now have way more "coding power". The cost of th

I think he's got a point in that there was a simplicity in the past that was useful, but the counterpoint is we now have way more "coding power". The cost of that is a learning cost: you need to know a bunch of things before you can make a modern app. I can see why someone new to coding might find it a little daunting. Here's some things you need to know a bit about before you can write most things: - Networking. What's a subnet mask? How does routing work? What's special about 10/8 and 192.168/16? - Security models. What do the letters AAA mean? How do you use oauth? You're told not to roll your own, so here you have to learn someone else's lib. And you can't avoid it completely, every OS requires some kind of account system with privileges/restrictions given to different users. - Drawing stuff models. How does a web page render? What about an Android, iOS, or a Windows form? Annoyingly I did all these things at some point, and they're not quite the same. Vocabulary varies, for instance. - How do you use libs in whatever language you're looking at? Again, there's a whole load and they're all similar but different. - How does git work? You're not gonna avoid getting something from github or similar. So now you need to have an idea of how git works, and the use model represented by github/gitlab/bitbucket etc. But once you know most of these things, you can get a lot farther than you could on some 1990s small business network. You can shove stuff in the cloud for scaling or resilience, you can keep dependencies clean with various container-type stuff, you can put media on CDN, and so on.