I think there's some serious rose coloured glasses going on here. I started my first job as a developer in 1994. My first task was to add some XDR to our RPC c

I think there's some serious rose coloured glasses going on here. I started my first job as a developer in 1994. My first task was to add some XDR to our RPC code to ensure big-endian and little-endian machines could talk to each other. This was in the C language. As in, tiny standard library, manual memory management, etc. No type safety. I wrote a UI using X/Motif. It was a pretty simple UI with a File menu for loading and saving, and some other edit menus etc. It took ages. No type safety meant that accidentally passing a pointer to a button to a Motif library function that expected a pointer to a label caused a segmentation fault. I still love C but not if I'm building an actual application. I absolutely do use C if I'm curious how well llvm can optimise a loop for counting prime numbers or calculating pi. Then along came C++. Now I had some actual data structures and algorithms. Memory management was easier but still error prone. But the compiler we were using was very slow when using a lot of STL code (Standard Template Library) so once our codebase was big enough, building and linking would take over an hour. There were some workarounds but they were clunky and caused their own issues. I didn't like Java when it came along because I thought the whole idea of compiling to JVM bytecode and running a JVM in production rather than a compiled executable was obviously slow and wrong. Java has been around for years and lots of mistakes have been made along the way but it's a really solid environment with access to a HUGE number of libraries and frameworks. Web apps used to be simple - there was only so much you could do. But then javascript and the infamous XMLHttpRequest came along and people could suddenly make really nice interactive sites. That kicked off another years-long period of trying to figure out how best to write large, complex applications with web technologies. But don't kid yourself. The benefits of web apps far outweigh the complexities and "slowness". Other developers would have experienced other journeys. A modern word processor is vastly more complex than early word processors. I used to really like word perfect 5.1 because it was responsive and very capable and never crashed but when Microsoft Word came along, people obviously preferred it, even if it was slow and crashed all the time. So I'd say modern software is complex and has problems that come with complexity but the slowness isn't really it. I used to edit code in vi. It was pretty responsive. You can bet your bottom dollar that it's really fast still. But I prefer JetBrains IDEs. Sometimes they're slow or a little buggy but the trade off is worth it.