I hear my coworker complain about it regularly, talking about how much easier Powerbuilder was to do applications and how far astray we've went. :) But it's tr

I hear my coworker complain about it regularly, talking about how much easier Powerbuilder was to do applications and how far astray we've went. :) But it's true -- we had nice, established patterns for client-server applications and we go through more and more hacks to give it the same usability as a VB6 app over a decade ago in twice the hours. To be fair, people have tried to solve it. Remember applets? For some reason, they never caught on. I worked on flex apps, and the only problem was that it depended on the flash plugin, was expensive, and had some maddening incongruities of its own. Others have tried and failed as well, because the web, to most people, is good enough. We're in a "worse is better" kind of situation now. Plan 9 may have been better than Unix, VAX may have been better, but they didn't win.