I know C++, used to know Perl, and know JavaScript pretty well. The fact that you actually name WebSockets as a technology sort of sums up the issue we are discussing here. WebSockets is not something that can be compared to C++ or even Node. It&#x27;s a dumb hack which justifies its existence primarily by allowing web apps to circumvent corporate firewall policies.<p>The web is a joke of an app platform. Those of us who have wider experience of different kinds of programmings see some web devs struggling with this concept and conclude, I think quite reasonably, that the only plausible explanation is lack of experience. This is not due to &quot;outdated skills&quot; - I daresay everyone criticising the web as a platform in this thread has, in fact, written web apps. It&#x27;s the opposite problem. It&#x27;s to do with developers who haven&#x27;t got the experience of older technologies having nothing to compare it too, so &quot;web 2.2&quot; gets compared to compared to &quot;web 2.0&quot; and it looks like progress.<p>And in case you&#x27;re tempted to dismiss me too, I recently tried to write an app using Polymer. It sucked. The entire experience was godawful from beginning to end. Luckily the app in question didn&#x27;t <i>have</i> to be a web app, so I started over with a real widget toolkit and got results that were significantly better in half the time.