Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.
I’m reading the book valley of genius where the xerox parc people basically make the same argument. The Xerox Alto’s smalltalk environment still isn’t matched today and the PC experience is much weaker for it.
The problem with those kinds of environments (where everything is editable at runtime using highly expressive langiages) is they assume everyone is a power user and there are no malevolant actors trying to mess up your machine. That’s not what the modern landscape is like.
kinda so did reasonably modern ideas. take active desktop for example! sure it’s more high level, but i believe the quote is that they wanted websites to do “cool things” with the desktop. cringeworthy by today’s standards...
things get more locked down as we develop abstractions that we have more control over
