There is a massive advantage in being able to see the web tech stack for what it is and wielding it without over-engineering or fanaticism, while your competitors are spending 2-3x on monstrosities that essentially does the same thing, but slower.

The day a professor made me implement a simple http server was the day I achieved code enlightenment.

At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

That was the web, yeah. Absurdly simple. Now all new protocols are binary and require reading several academic papers instead of a single RFC.

> At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

Exactly... I worry about the masses learning of this and gaining literacy over the landed gentry.

PHP/CGI basically had it solved. I emulate PHP in .NET6 today using verbatim and interpolated string operations.

Relevant: https://twitter.com/serbantanasa/status/1582019078533046272

I was originally concerned about your parent comment regarding your new foray into web dev (that C++ path sounds amazing), but this comment has put my soul at ease.

If you walk into web dev with aggressive principles and a willingness to be controversial, you can get a lot of shit done and it will feel great. Watching others struggle under the various JS framework circuses has almost an opulent/aristocratic vibe in 2023.

Fair point. The web stack is the one thing I actively avoid doing anything significant with for exactly the reasons you've just described.

Out of the frying pan, into the cow manure.