> Do you remember what it was like before XML and Java?
Yes – in particular, I remember liking the initial promise of XML 1.0 and then being disappointed as the initial simplicity was buried under layers of gratuitous complexity as the enterprise computing crowd jumped on board. Some neat ideas (e.g. XPath)
Similarly, my first database-backed web app was a Java servlet in 1996. I assumed it would become richer in the future but it was still pretty easy write and deployment was pretty simple at that point. Instead, the community chased off after more complexity (JavaBeans, the near-pervasive obsession with runtime configuration and the ensuing massive config files, nested abstraction layers, etc.) rather than focusing on basic developer productivity. We got massive piles of code like RMI (i.e. CORBA) before basic features like regular expressions, logging, etc.
> Could we have built anything on the scale of the web with CORBA?
No. We also failed, repeatedly, to do it with XML for reasons which are obvious to anyone who's ever used SOAP/WSDL/etc.
The common theme was seeing complexity and, especially, abstraction as a universal good rather than something with real costs and forgetting how important high-quality implementations are, particularly when you're relying on them to help with all of that complexity.