In some ways it does. I am working on a Database system in Django by myself. Higher level languages and frameworks will eat at performance in terms of speed, but give a true developer advantage compared to not using them. 10 years ago it would probably have taken a team of 5 to achieve the same thing. Depends what you are measuring.<p>Go back 30 or so years and people were using punch cards. Do you think it would be possible to "knock up a quick web app" programming like that?