I agree with your general point, but: > I despise the web. The web used to be great. I think you're despising something else. > HTML was designed for static

I agree with your general point, but: > I despise the web. The web used to be great. I think you're despising something else. > HTML was designed for static documents, it boggles my mind that things like nodejs were created. It's not a secret. Someone already told me we were heading this way in 2005, using JS to write apps inside web pages. It boggled my mind then, but it hasn't really boggled since. My main worry (and sadness) was that JS was such an utterly shitty programming language back then. It was something you loved to hate, writing JS functionality for web pages was almost like a boast; look at the trick I can make this document do by abusing this weird little scripting language. But that has changed, oh boy has it changed. Almost all the warts in JS can be easily avoided today. With the addition of the `class` keyword (standardizing the already possible but hacky class-like constructs), the arrow functions, and the extreme performance increase in current engines, it's actually become one of my favourite languages to code for. But don't worry I don't use it to write bloated web apps :) > HTML techs can't even run efficiently on a cheap smartphone, which is the reason apps are needed for smartphones to be usable. That's not the reason why apps are "needed". It's simply because it allows for more spying on the user. A website can only do it when it's loaded, an app can do it all the time, periodically, on boot, or whenever. They get a neat device-global tracking ID (and more than enough fingerprinting info, just in case), which makes tracking super easy and the advertisers happy. They don't have to do anything with that cookie permission banner EU law, because, well yeah apparently the EC didn't realize that apps are being used to do everything the advertisers want but the websites can't. Cookies are child's play compared to the trackers they can insert at elbow depth. And the few apps which are actually apps because performance of being a web app doesn't suffice, they actually tend to be about performance and not so bad in the bigger picture. You see the same thing on the web though, all the bloat and slowness and shit is caused by ads and tracking. Normally we fight against industries that are a net negative on society. Except that ads happen to be equivalent to propaganda, and tracking happens to be equivalent to surveillance, so somehow there's not a lot of push from the powers to get rid of these things, because of how convenient it is this industry just builds the infrastructure for them. They especially like it when the tracking is sent over unsecured HTTP. That said, there should be sufficient work for a qualified engineer to write code for industrial applications, no? Many web devs can only write PHP/JS framework code. If you know how to program industrial controllers, or have similar qualities, experience with various industrial systems, I doubt you're going to have to explain anyone you're not a web dev ...