On the other hand, I never understood how to build anything with Access despite having a book on it as a teen.
Web tech, even in its early forms, was much more obvious to me and I could run code in the browser's web console. I could find JS snippets online, paste them into index.html, and open the page. I found VB/Access far more confusing than that.
These days I help beginners pick up web dev and I think HNers overestimate (if not circlejerk over) how hard it is just because create-react-app does a lot of things. Client development always had a bunch of specific knowledge you had to learn, and the fat stack of supporting software you generally use (IDEs, Xcode, node_modules, SDK APIs, browser APIs, etc) was always a behemoth.
Access was the hard part of those things. Using a form builder to get a basic form up and build some interactions, though, was trivial back in the day.
Were there complications? Of course there were. Would I recommend some of those practices to build something? Not necessarily. But I can't get behind any claims that we made any progress on making things easier for hobby programs.
Closest we have to that, would be the scratch programs my kids have been making.
Hilariously, the best thing for making games and similar ideas that my kids would have, is going to be Mario Maker. By a long shot.
Web tech, even in its early forms, was much more obvious to me and I could run code in the browser's web console. I could find JS snippets online, paste them into index.html, and open the page. I found VB/Access far more confusing than that.
These days I help beginners pick up web dev and I think HNers overestimate (if not circlejerk over) how hard it is just because create-react-app does a lot of things. Client development always had a bunch of specific knowledge you had to learn, and the fat stack of supporting software you generally use (IDEs, Xcode, node_modules, SDK APIs, browser APIs, etc) was always a behemoth.