> With the web almost everyone has a machine that has a programmable environment by default again. I feel this is a very important and powerful advantage that’s often overlooked.
As someone else who cut their teeth on an 8-bit micro back in the day, I agree with this 100%.
And I think it's a large part of the reason I'm so suspicious of the stampede in webdev toward very heavyweight toolchains over the past 5+ years; while they may have had the best of intentions, I think they do end up putting gatekeeper-ey accessibility barriers around the web's original rough democracy. It's not that the underlying technology has gone away, more that when someone starts looking around the mainstream web to see how things are put together, that's not what they're going to find.
As someone else who cut their teeth on an 8-bit micro back in the day, I agree with this 100%.
And I think it's a large part of the reason I'm so suspicious of the stampede in webdev toward very heavyweight toolchains over the past 5+ years; while they may have had the best of intentions, I think they do end up putting gatekeeper-ey accessibility barriers around the web's original rough democracy. It's not that the underlying technology has gone away, more that when someone starts looking around the mainstream web to see how things are put together, that's not what they're going to find.