The Plumbing of Everyday Magic

Web development has certainly gotten more complicated, but that's mostly because people are doing more complicated things. Writing the equivalent of a "Geocities, Blogosphere, and StumbleUpon era" site doesn't have to be any more complicated than it was then. My email provider offers free static hosting; I can upload some HTML files and have a website running in about 10 seconds.

> Good tools don't hide complexity behind a curtain, they eliminate the need for it.

Good tools absolutely hide complexity behind a curtain. The faucet example at the beginning, that tool is hiding a whole industry's worth of complexity. The trade-off is that it only does one thing. If you want to do something more complicated e.g. build a water park, you either have to deal with that new complexity yourself or hope someone else builds the infrastructure you need.

I can sympathize with the author that the web isn't as easy to create on as they envision. That would be cool. But so would flying cars. Those aren't impossible either, but both require a whole lot of "plumbing" that hasn't been built.

I think the problem with the opening metaphor is that using stuff is fundamentally different from making stuff. Clicking the button on an app works so reliably because everybody uses it the same way. They open the app, they click the button. The point of building things is that you are doing something different and new! And sure, you could say "but for the individual part of my workflow, I'm using using a tool," but you're still trying to do something new with those tools.