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Comment by chadaustin | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of working on an old Windows UI almost two decades ago. All the tutorials were basically "you should type this", and all the project templates and UI editors in Visual Studio produced copious amounts of generated code. Nobody seemed to really understand that generated code. So I sat down and learned how to write a new MFC project from scratch, no templates or generated code. Once I understood what it was doing, I felt like I could use the rest of the ecosystem with confidence.

A useful, educational exercise!

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>>Reminds me of working on an old Windows UI

Me too, in a different way. It provides a very clear view of how MVC moves from the back end to the front end. Coupled with other things that have moved more of the meat of the work to the browser, you end up in a funny circular place.

At a high level, it starts to look much more like the pre-web client/server model of "fat clients" written in MS/MFC, or C/X11/Motif/Qt/etc, and the backend relegated to mostly serving centralized data or events.

What's old is new again I suppose. The browser, in general, feels like a giant step forward. I wish, though, that some ecosystem had evolved where Javascript wasn't the sole supported client side language.

>What's old is new again I suppose. The browser, in general, feels like a giant step forward. I wish, though, that some ecosystem had evolved where Javascript wasn't the sole supported client side language.

Webassembly is coming!

That's somewhat encouraging, but if I understand it correctly, it would only be practical for static typed languages. Something like Lua, Python, etc, would be more desirable to me.

It's a byte code (in an ast form) so any language could run.

I think the step after can be around package management (like in linux distros) and full virtualisation in the browser.

We can even imagine the browser becoming useless so we could move to something new for AI, drones and robots where webdesign is not a priority (simpler UI like apps for mobiles).

Not anytime soon, as far as I can tell:

Brendan Eich: "wasm is really starting out as a target for static languages like C++, it’s gonna be a while before we get other future extensions to wasm like garbage collection and just-in-time compile to wasm, features we need for dynamic languages to perform well, that’s gonna take a while to do, too"

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