I don’t know that learning CSS+HTML is any harder than learning, say, Swing, even though Swing is part of the standard Java libs, or learning X windows graphics, which could be called from C. These whole secondeary languages, like Javascript, aren’t much harder than a complex library that you’d call from C. And back in the day, I either had to write platform specific code for X11, Mac, or Windows or NeXT, or learn another language, like Tcl/Tk.

When I do threading now, it’s a whole lot easier to use Java’s util.concurrent than it was to try to throw together my own Posix thread implementations in C. But that’s just a lib issue. Ditto with socket and HTTP code, which is way easier to deal with now. Double so with clustering from tools like Hadoop and Amazon EC2/S3; it’s way easier to do that way than to figure out how to install your own hardware and software.

Back in the day, it was sed/awk/grep and unix command lines, and then it became Perl, and now Python. You always had to know a mix of this stuff to be productive.

Take XML as another example. Back in 1999, we had to write parsers for specialized languages by hand. I’d use lex and YACC, which I’d argue were no easier to use and/or learn than SAX or DOM for XML. And the advantage of the latter is that the character encodings and escaping and DTDs are all uniform, so you only have to learn them once.