It seems to be more of an Internet Culture thing than a Software Developer thing. There's a huge industry of C/C++/Ada/Assembly/.NET/JVM programmers out there, behind the scenes. Many of them are working for big companies, and big ol' companies generally aren't cool with their employees even talking about what they do online. You know that old 'the opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the company I work for or their investors or their advertisers" spiel? That's considered lenient.

But the Internet likes to talk about itself, so here it seems the only world is Javascript. And this corner of the Internet likes to talk about "tech startups", which is a very broad sounding term that actually refers to a very narrow set of almost exclusively web-technology companies. Not much hardware coming out of YC.

Additionally, this is somewhat of a "get rich quick" crowd, and nothing gets you a bigger market faster than a 'web app', whatever you define that to mean. It was always hard to get the average computer user to install desktop software, let alone pay for it, and that hasn't changed much.