Fundamentally it is about GUI toolkits and design, and those get chucked for fashion yearly now. It used to be five year cycles, but now with the web toolkit d

Fundamentally it is about GUI toolkits and design, and those get chucked for fashion yearly now. It used to be five year cycles, but now with the web toolkit du jour and constant web "standards" churn, it happens even faster. And that's without the hipster "design" fads like material design and flat design and all that jazz. UIs are a variant of the halting problem: unlike a lot of fixed input/output systems like CLIs and other things that programmers love, any non-trivial UI will rapidly cycle out of control in terms of making a good testability, and that's for code that is fundamentally a lot more difficult to get up and running for even the base use cases. HTML in the beginning attempted to solve that with its simple forms. Well, those got chucked out for ... whatever it is we have now. I'm not saying that the HTML basic form wasn't flawed, but for the standards bodies after five major revisions to the HTML standard to not do anything and basically just say "here's CSS and javascript if you want validation or multiple buttons or anything that powerbuilder had back in 1990" well, that's an industry failure too. It seriously flabbergasts me that we had powerbuilder and a lot of the VB stuff cranking out pretty sophisticated interfaces on 486s and pentiums and we are still spinning our wheels 30 years later with 100-1000x the computational firepower.