The Appalachian Trail, created in the early 1900's, was an efficient trail that bypassed most mountain peaks. Over the years, however, the A.T. has been re-routed to go over the top of more and more mountains making it substantially more difficult than it originally was. One of the earliest thru-hikers hiked the entire trail in the 40's. This same person thru-hiked the trail decades later, after all the re-routing over mountain tops, and upon completion inquired, "When did it get so hard?".

This is what I think about software development, specifically web development. When did programming get so hard?

Let's say you're starting on an asp.net MVC 5 project. You need to:
1. Learn C# (or VB.net but really, C#)
2. Choose an ORM (NHibernate, etc.) and learn that
3. Learn T-SQL because ORM's often produce really bad T-SQL for queries
4. Javascript
5. JQuery because mostly you don't want to write javascript directly
6. CSS - enjoy this hell (http://img.pandawhale.com/post-18529-Yes-mlkshk-1nAi.gif)
7. JQuery UI because why reinvent the UI wheel
8. Bootstrap, because CSS is a giant PIA and this gives you a good framework for responsive layouts.
9. You probably want to implement some Single Page Application techniques so learn Angular, Knockout, etc.
10. Struggle with browser incompatibilities and inconsistencies that the above frameworks are supposed to insulate you from.
11. Figure out how to automate testing on all the different layers (api, UI, etc.)
12. But wait, there's more I haven't even touched.

Over the last 3 decades the only thing we've managed to do is come full circle with the Server + Dumb Terminal paradigm only we've made it way, way harder on the programmers. Awesome.