I read so far One reason you probably shouldn’t bet your whole career on JavaScript, which boils down to how WebAssembly is going to make JS irrelevant by allowing other languages to run in browsers.
On the one hand, it makes the common, tiresome confusion between JavaScript the language and the platforms it runs on: people don’t make careers out of JavaScript-the-language, they make careers out of becoming really good at web development, which entails a dizzying array of technologies, APIs, arcana and inherent complexities of building things that run on all sorts of browsers and work well for all sorts of people. (What exactly is the author cautioning against? Getting attached to the subtleties of substr() vs. substring()?)
On the other hand, WebAssembly is not meantto replace JavaScript. And finally, the author grossly underestimates the glacial pace of web standard evolution and browser adoption; 10 to 20 years is not that long, I’ll be lucky to see SVG 2 within my working lifetime :-)
His conclusion is that we blame our tools for our own shortcomings and that rather than inventing new programming languages we should learn how to be responsible. This is FUD tbh, he doesn’t discuss any new language which are not old languages in disguise (i.e. he talks about go and kotlin but not idris and rust) and then he uses this omission-strategy to ‘strengthen’ his argument.
Cobol may very well be the perfect interface-philosophy for a programming language but that doesn’t mean that there is no merit in improving the internals of our most fundamental tools. I think the 21st century will bring massive advances in the practice of programming as our ability to leverage theorem provers grows.
I read so far One reason you probably shouldn’t bet your whole career on JavaScript, which boils down to how WebAssembly is going to make JS irrelevant by allowing other languages to run in browsers.
On the one hand, it makes the common, tiresome confusion between JavaScript the language and the platforms it runs on: people don’t make careers out of JavaScript-the-language, they make careers out of becoming really good at web development, which entails a dizzying array of technologies, APIs, arcana and inherent complexities of building things that run on all sorts of browsers and work well for all sorts of people. (What exactly is the author cautioning against? Getting attached to the subtleties of
substr()vs.substring()?)On the other hand, WebAssembly is not meant to replace JavaScript. And finally, the author grossly underestimates the glacial pace of web standard evolution and browser adoption; 10 to 20 years is not that long, I’ll be lucky to see SVG 2 within my working lifetime :-)
His conclusion is that we blame our tools for our own shortcomings and that rather than inventing new programming languages we should learn how to be responsible. This is FUD tbh, he doesn’t discuss any new language which are not old languages in disguise (i.e. he talks about go and kotlin but not idris and rust) and then he uses this omission-strategy to ‘strengthen’ his argument.
Cobol may very well be the perfect interface-philosophy for a programming language but that doesn’t mean that there is no merit in improving the internals of our most fundamental tools. I think the 21st century will bring massive advances in the practice of programming as our ability to leverage theorem provers grows.