Programming in 2015

My current developer platform is:

1. CSS.
2. HTML. (Bootstrap)
3. JavaScript.
4. Node.js Server.

Think of how much you have to learn to become really useful in this world. At least four different syntaxes, and a CSS preprocessor.

HTML is XML, JavaScript is like C or Pascal. The server could be written in any number of different languages. And JSON. None of them are going away.
I've been working with software for many years, and right now would be at a loss to write a simple "Hello World" app. What a Tower of Babel we have once again today.

Systems grow when they are simple. The big strides in technologie happen when the platform gets reduced to simplicity. Examples include:

COBOL, UNIX
Superbrain with CP/M and Basic.
MS-DOS with Wordstar and Quickbasic.
Turbo Pascal
Superbase
The Web with a plain text editor.

With all these systems, getting started was relatively easy. Typing and modifying "Hello World" was easy. From there, there were no huge cliffs in the way of becoming proficient and useful.

How to proceed? I am starting again, this time from Node.js and building out with Bootstrap on Amazon S3.

And once again I am confronted with the big gap between ideas and implementation. Wish me luck!