When the web first came out, "real" programmers turned their noses up at it.

A serious question people asked at the time: "Do web pages count as real programming, or are they just toys?"

Everyone then knew that real programmers wrote windows apps, not web pages.

The web was "weird" but it was weird in a way that was true to its nature.

One way to approach starting the web would have been "Make it possible to write things that feel like writing windows apps, and make them possible to distribute in this new ecosystem."

But that would have foregrounded the wrong thing: the windows app and all of the expectations and baggage it brought along with it.

The actual important thing for the web was the new universe of possible experiences that come with changing the laws of physics with a radically different distribution model.

The distribution model was so powerful and so good that even though "real" programmers turned their noses up at it, a whole new class of programmers came into being that were web native.

Over time, the web became more and more powerful as more people stretched it to do more things.

Today, no one argues whether people creating web apps are "real" programmers.