So we had finger, talk, irc, smtp, nntp, ftp, etc, all layered on TCP. And now we have dozens of popular implementations of roughly the same functionality laye

So we had finger, talk, irc, smtp, nntp, ftp, etc, all layered on TCP. And now we have dozens of popular implementations of roughly the same functionality layered on REST/HTTP or JSON/WebSockets or whatever. I suggest that the complexity is basically that same, from a programmers point of view. You define messages and a state machine and a bunch of event-handling … The UI is now universal (mostly) but the programming model for HTML/CSS isn’t simpler than say Xaw/Xt: it is more capable, but putting together a decent UI for a browser-based email client is not substantially easier than doing it in Xaw/Xt. With one exception: our programming languages are better, and the ecosystem of libraries and frameworks makes what would once have been weeks of work an import statement. We could do the same things in the same time using custom protocols over at TCP as we do using JSON over WebSockets, using modern tooling, but the world has moved on. The entire ecosystem of libraries and services and network infrastructure channels you into using a vastly more complex stack.