> Not really - you could write cross-platform GUI applications from a single code base in 1996 if you wanted to without using Java. It was unpleasant, but it was absolutely possible.
Right - as seen by Netscape. We can also speak about codeweavers and others we have, but in '96, those were out of reach by all but the largest applications. (Pagemaker, word, etc.) However, the honest truth is that web apps were an order of magnitude cheaper for anything that wasn't desktop-heavy in 1996.
Again, worse is better.
> Python and Java are relatively painless in this regard.
Does your user have the right version of python? Are you bundling python with your application? I haven't worked with pyinstaller - it might be better today, but
And as far as writing python gui applications... Tkinter and WxPython are ugly. PyQt and PyGtk, last I looked at it, was painful and effectively meant knowing C++, and Qt licensing from non-oss is rough. Jython is punting the java problem above. In what world is this not painless?
I wrote a JavaFX app just for myself a bit back because I didn't want the overhead of Electron for my simple app. The experience in bundling it for each was not straightforward, especially with post Java 9. Jpackage and jlink and graalvm exist today, but the work around them are not as straightforward as getting a webapp up and running.
The experience does not, by its very nature, have to be worse than web applications, but we've had two orders of magnitude in engineering effort to make the web application developer experience better. In 1996, even with as small as the internet was at that point, enterprise application deployment was so painful that web applications were a giant competitive advantage.