>And after 20 years of professional development on multiple platforms and languages, I still largely prefer web development. I'm far from alone. I think that sa

>And after 20 years of professional development on multiple platforms and languages, I still largely prefer web development. I'm far from alone. I think that says a lot more about classical "application" development than it does about the web. I'm curious why. For me, I've always been interested in keeping intellectually stimulated when I'm at work. I don't want impossible challenges but I want something that, while I'm working, time disappears so it doesn't feel like work. Now, I did my fair share of server side rendering applications in the 2000s and enjoyed it at first. It was quite enjoyable to be able to pass my ideas and application around to others without the barriers of cross platform compatibility or security models that make running unknown or less known native binaries a no-no. This melted away with web applications (mostly, bar some pretty notable browser vulnerabilities during that era). What happened really was Chrome's sandboxing and security overall that comforted many that running arbitrary JS code from an external source was "OK" because your browser was mostly protecting you from doing nasty things to your local system and data. This exploded into expanding JS, ES, and the entire development ecosystem. To me, this is really what made things intriguing and I suspect why many love web development, they can easily share their creations now to about anyone without many barriers, just type in this address on your phone or laptop and tada. Unfortunately, the development ecosystem is a mess. I don't think this says anything negative about classic application development, I love classic application development because it's usually well structured and I don't have to waste cognitive load dealing with silly technical issues I don't care about--I can focus on the application and what I want to create more. I don't want to know why this silly UI element isn't behaving the way it should and deal with a workaround, I just want a UI element that does this so I can move along and do the interesting work. What traditional application development really lacked was ease of portability for others to use securely. The OS has now become the browser to many and this is their playground. Unfortunately I don't enjoy it because I'm used to mature frameworks where I don't worry so much about the application development as much, I worry about the application and translation of ideas into something people can use. Web development is getting there but it's just not there yet and if you've been spoiled with stable development environments it's hard to go back to the wild west of dealing with what you considered to be mostly solved problems decades ago.