...And now thanks to things like ClojureScript's Figwheel and Devcards and the various React hot loaders, we're getting closer to 1978.
Some of us use Common Lisp and are thus all the way to 1994:-)
It'd be kinda of nice to use something even better, though. I've still not found it.
"...very simple database systems such as MUMPS".
I'm not sure MUMPS is a good example of a simple system.
The first customer of IBM Research's System R relational database was Pratt and Whitney in 1977. [1] IBM didn't release a commercial relational database until 1981. [2] The article is from 1978. Anyway MUMPS is probably simpler since than an SQL database since its database is a key value store. The big problem is that it made it easy to write unreadable code and people wrote enough of it to give it a bad reputation.