The cost constraints on many products and the sophisticated UIs and APIs which can be implemented in HTTP and HTTP-like protocols via web UIs and XML make it the obvious choice for hardware products which need extensibility combined with low cost. As I said before, the hardware which would be necessary to implement all that functionality without using a web UI is much more expensive. Why reinvent the wheel?
This is why the next big revolution in the workplace will be machines talking directly to other machines via text-based protocols- but usually without people in between them as is the case today.
Every ipv6 capable device has its own globally unique network address.. Think about that for a minute.
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You know, there is a body of early research in what is called "ubiquitous computing" (much of it was doe at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center or "PARC") that you might want to check out.
As it was a vision of a kind of high-productivity- high-functioning cooperative workspace which for some reason we still have not managed to ever replicate in corporate America, but which does often happen in pure science research/academia.
Since you lack exposure to academia, it would also be an opportunity for you to build up some of the knowledge acquisition skills you would otherwise get doing college level research and writing papers.
You might want to check out the Linux operating system because of it's wealth of tools for science. I can tell you that for large segments of the computing world, Linux and other Unixes are the default operating systems for many reasons. Stability is just one of them. Another is Unix's modular nature lends itself to scripting, connecting the (standardized) text-based output of one application to the input of another in chains.
If there is an exception (error), its also handled in a standardized way.
Linux is free so all you need is time and some hardware or disk space you can devote to the task. You likely already have a quite capable Linux box if you have a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC.
The recent RPIs actually are more powerful real computers than many high end boxes were back in the day.
There is really a lot of software available for them, including (for free!) Mathematica.
[Note: If you use an RPI as your Linux desktop, you should use a real hard drive.. and get in the habit of backing it up (or use software RAID for redundancy) because flash memory wears out eventually. Especially you should not compile large software packages on a flash card. That might toast it very quickly.]