Yeah, with AngularJS and REST I can finally approach the level of productivity that Visual Basic 4.0 had 20 years ago.

It works, yes, but with great effort. Think of all the development time spent grafting applications on top of what is fundamentally a document delivery system.

It's hack upon hack, kluge upon kluge.

Example: Do you think HTML/CSS/JS is the right way to develop a user interface for an application? I don't.

It's a damned sight better than tk, wxWigets, Swing, SWT, AWT, MFC, or any of a bajillion other things we've tried in the desktop.

Yeah, you're right, all those things are terrible, too. Can't we do better than what we have?

No, it hasn't. The web is a terrible, hacked-together mess. Things break often and catastrophically. HTTP 2.0 is layering on more hacks instead of trimming the fat.