Some argue this is a fallacy - manufacturing is making gains in efficiency much much faster than the service sector - this overstates the degree to which manufacturing has declined and understates its importance - from Ha-Joon Chang "23 things they didn't tell you about capitalism". He goes on to point out that although increased efficiencies have reduced the relative contribution of manufacturing, manufacturing is still quite important to some very successful advanced economies. Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, Finland, and Sweden have the highest levels of industrial output per head of population. The same author also points out that the low tradability of services may result in service based economies having problems with their balance of payments.

Similar background: 30 years of coding - academic, commercial, COBOL, C, C++, Java, Javascript, Python, ...

I've recently been looking at Java code so full of horribly complex calls to combinations of outdated horrible frameworks, that I was thinking the same thing - "We may well look back on these years of great web development as building a legacy that a lot of us spend the rest of our lives trying to reverse-engineer, fix and replace."

I was thinking that Rails or Django might at least reduce the amount of stuff to learn to get maintenance done.

Are we stuck in a general purpose 3GL+API rut? Rails, Django, HTML and SQL show that stepping beyond a general purpose language can sometimes simplify creating programs. When do we decide to cross over from API's to domain specific languages, and what does that say about the limitations of 3GL's and API's?

Twenty years ago processors were slow, but some UNIX boxes had more than one. Where this was the case, pipes and named pipes could be used to keep more than one CPU busy. Such techniques were often used to for linking troff, eqn, etc. The skill required was not much more than the ability to break a task down into large sized units that could work independently. Of course not all tasks are amenable to such an approach, but many are.

Similar experience here. After at least 10 years with Fedora and Red Hat, I've switched to OpenSUSE to get access to a stable KDE.

I'm quite used to modifying my Linux environment to get where I want to be. I did evaluate Fedora 10, but at the moment, Fedora doen't seem to be a good starting base for a KDE user. So I can see why people are switching.