HTTP is so retarded
Discussion
I have no idea what any of this means but I’m happy I read it. Love it!
Websockets
Yes, HTTP is stupid and WebSockets are a million times better.
By the way, WebSockets don't "use HTTP" at all, they just send an initial handshake message that looks very much like an HTTP request. It's a very clever and amazing hack.
Is gRPC a good alternative? Don't know much about it but I'm wondering if I should learn.
Alternative to what? I think gRPC is directly tied to protobufs. It is probably good, better than HTTP for proprietary APIs, but I've never used that and I don't want the taste of that Google library bloat in my mouth.
You forgot to mention that there are 3+ ways to send data from client to server and 3+ ways to return data or for the server to notify the client -- and each implementation uses a different combination of all these ways (like a server requires some specific headers + some specific querystring + some specific data in body, then it returns some specific headers + some specific status code + some specific data in the body in a specific format). The cognitive overhead is absurd.
At least you can have all the fun trying to escape it correctly in the URL