It is. Try teaching coding to someone non technical, especially someone that doesn't want to learn, and by the time you get them to understand what a variable is, you will fully understand that coding is not for everyone.
What he suggested wasn't viable in terms of productivity either. One may be programmer but don't want to spend time administering the insignificant parts of the system.
I never understood the culture of elitism in system micro-administration by hobbyist crowd.
That's largely the fault of ads. Some well placed JS stuff is lightning fast, even on mobile.
> 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 ...
HTML was designed for static documents, it boggles my mind that things like nodejs were created. It's not a secret.
HTML techs can't even run efficiently on a cheap smartphone, which is the reason apps are needed for smartphones to be usable.
Every time I'm talking to someone for job offers, I state that I want to avoid web techs. No js, no web frameworks. I prefer industrial computing, to build things that are useful. I don't want to make another interface that will get thrown away for whatever reason.
Today the computing industry has completely migrated towards making user interfaces, UX things, fancy shiny smoothy scrolly whatnots, just to employ people who can't write SQL. Companies only want to sell attention. This is exactly what the economy of attention is about.
All I dream about is some OS, desktop or mobile, that lets the user write scripts directly. It's time you encourage users to write code. It's not that hard.