Totally agree, I think we'd all be in major trouble if the mere exposure to Basic corrupted us. There is a whole generation that grew up on QBasic, GWBasic and of course Apple II's Basic.
As an aside, there's a definitely part of me that envies the days of building command line applications.
You really got to focus on the meat of the problem, instead of so much frilly interface issues which occupy us now. I think very few software engineers don't dream of the days when showing a text menu with a prompt for what action they wanted to take was about as far down the UI path you had to go.
I'm of course not arguing that the the web isn't far better in myriad ways, but the expectation to build beautiful interfaces, even if those expectations are purely our own, certainly has changed where we spend our time.
I'm still writing command-line applications (compilers), but they don't even do menus, everything comes from the command line or from files input.
But I don't think the server-side of the web is much different. Web servers are not a lot more than a function of the input stream to the output stream - compilers are much the same. A lot of fun can be had if you're in the deep end of the server side, writing framework functionality.
Ya, no for sure, I got to work on the backend of big web systems for a while and it was fun. (AMZN actually, the mother of all web backends)
But once you are in the teeny startup space then you become the jack of all trades and then you have to deal with the whole stack again. Unless you figure out how to make money off of jsonip.com that is. :)
As an aside, there's a definitely part of me that envies the days of building command line applications.
You really got to focus on the meat of the problem, instead of so much frilly interface issues which occupy us now. I think very few software engineers don't dream of the days when showing a text menu with a prompt for what action they wanted to take was about as far down the UI path you had to go.
I'm of course not arguing that the the web isn't far better in myriad ways, but the expectation to build beautiful interfaces, even if those expectations are purely our own, certainly has changed where we spend our time.