Comment by kybernetikos

I agree with the core point about experience remaining relevant, but I think you underestimate the changes that got us here. For example, we've learnt a lot about jits in the last 20 years. The fact that we can write interpreted code that can achieve near compiled speeds in certain situations is amazing.

Speed of interpreted Javascript has improved by two orders of magnitude on the same hardware in the last ten years, and you don't see technological advance? I can't think of another field that has advanced so quickly.

I don't want to diss other fields, but an awful lot of the most valuable improvements in infrastructure in the last ten years have been about standardization and bringing technology that existed years ago to the masses.

On top of that, the inconvenience of the Web platform is real but also overhyped. Imagine you're writing a network app in another platform. It's extremely unlikely you have access to an integrated network analyzer as good as chromes. How many other systems allow you to completely modify the look of your application while it's running just to see how it looks by playing with the developer tools? Having a repl that allows you to interact with the running system has been standard on the Web platform for ever.

I'm not even sure what you're looking for. What would constitute new technology if 100x speed ups don't? Almost all of software is implied in the concept of the Turing machine so complaining that you can't achieve anything you couldn't have in the past with large, expensive, proprietary systems and specialized knowledge seems unfair. It's been true since Babbage at least.