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As a broader industry, we practice shameless elitism and seem to be making real-world software development more inaccessible to non-experts. As professionals. we deride RAD tools and "drag and drop" development, and show geek love for ever-more abstract modes of thinking like Functional Programming that a small percentage of working developers, let alone the general public, will grasp.

Yes. Look at what happened to HTML, which was supposed to be simple. Up to HTML 3.2, there were good WYSIWYG programs such as Dreamweaver which could do a good job of page layout. Then came CSS, div/clear/float layout, vast amounts of Javascript, and a mess so complex that HTML became only an output language for content management systems. Yet most of the pages look about the same.

The complexity of simple business applications has increased substantially since Visual Basic, yet most of them aren't doing anything that profound. (I occasionally point a finger at Soylent, which built an elaborate IT infrastructure for a site that averages about two sales a minute.)

The annual web infrastructure fads aren't helping. Some of the biggest sites run on rather vanilla infrastructure. Instagram runs on Postgres. Wikipedia runs on MySQL with Ngnix caches. Do you really need NoSQL?

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