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I wholeheartedly agree with your statements. I think there are a legion of developers who would love to program for the web, but refuse to learn|use and simply can not keep up with JS.

The browser is one of the only truly cross platform development environments around. The popularity of the browser is directly coupled to that fact in my opinion. How many developers|companies and organizations would be over the moon excited with hiring a Python|Ruby|Lua|Rust|C# developer that could talk natively to the browser? My guess is a LOT.

On the one hand, I hear you and don't disagree - programming ergonomics is a big deal, and access to the language you like is important. I for one really don't want to program in a language that uses significant whitespace, if I can avoid it.

On the other hand, "keep up with JS" is something of a misnomer here. It's not javascript that's moving super-fast, it's the web ecosystem (plus the node one, in parallel). It's moving fast because new ideas are evolving at speed (functional-reactive approaches, new ways to think about mixins vs multiple inheritance, etc), and those ideas lead to new framework architectures gaining popularity as they exploit these new ways of thinking about organizing data flow through a complicated system.

Couple that with some baseline things that aren't changing here - you're still going to have to interact with the DOM, you aren't going to magically get re-entrant multithreading, and the event model isn't changing. There's still going to be a lot about web programming that feels different from systems programming, and things are still going to move quickly. Probably even more quickly (but I'm not certain about that - I imagine one major reason JS shifts quickly is that it has so many programmers working with it, if the population fragments there will probably be a number of slow-moving communities that neither shift often nor take advantage of new features, which feels like the kind of neophile - neophobe split that's already apparent in different areas of programming).

So: I am not convinced that a (say) rust or go compiler to WASM will suddenly make front-end programming feel like systems programming. It'll be a new language, sure, but there's a lot more to web development and the (reasonable) complaints people have about a shifting landscape than just javascript and its funky definition of OO and triple equals sign.

I am not sure I am qualified to really debate the merits of the JS ecosystem; perceived or real at this time. I tried to do front-end stuff when Knockout and Backbone were popular and Node was just starting. Maybe a better phrase is; I had a hard time keeping up... it was the paradigm changes (as you mentioned), but it was also the volume.

Paralyzation due to choice and only so much time to evaluate each framework. Couple that to "staying" power, that is, will this library be around in 6 months? I have taken a peek from time to time and been thoroughly aghast at the volume and not really seeing any of the old stand-bys around.

Now compare that to Python. There is no dearth of choice and one will find many of these choices have been around for more than a decade. They have evolved and changed of course, but not anywhere near the pace of JS. Again, I could take a 3 to 6 month break from looking at Python news and libraries... then come back and jump right into most of the libs I already know. Can a JS dev do that?

> Couple that with some baseline things that aren't changing here

Doesn't webASM give the power to abstract those things away? React creates a virtual DOM, right? Why can't Python create a virtual DOM via webASM?

I stand with you in that I agree things are going to move quickly once Python and others become peers with JS in the browser. I am sure it will be insane as everyone figures out which lib will have staying power like Django, or similar in another lang. I do think that people who generally gravitate toward languages like Python, Go, C#, Java will bring those attitudes with them... that is, they aren't going to re-invent the wheel every three months unless there is a super compelling reason to do so.

I think there's room all over for different kinds of ergonomics for software development. Languages play a big role here, for sure, and having access to more languages for the front end feels like it will be good by definition- more choices is usually better. There's a lot lot lot of new stuff for sure in JS, and it can be pretty overwhelming.

I think, though, that you could pretty easily take a break from JS dev and come back and still use the tools you had six or twelve months ago, just fine. For example, I maintain a pretty big angular 1 application that has a lot of pre-1.4 code in it. It runs fine, and I haven't touched my build tooling in over a year. There's still a lot of very relevant questions and answers on stackoverflow and so on.

Now, I may well want to use react or angular4 or something else for my next project, but nothing is stopping me from using angular 1, or backbone, or just plain jquery for that matter. They all still work.

As to the virtual DOM - abstraction libraries are really cool (although the vDOM isn't really that), but they introduce just yet another thing that changes over time. At the end of the day, the DOM is a pretty complicated thing, between its own structure, event models, css, and everything else, so the API to interact with it is going to be complicated no matter what language you use. Most frameworks (backbone, jquery, angular, react, etc) are all just different attempts to manage that complication, and all they ever really do is shove the complication from one place to another, but (for example with functional reactive models) that other place is something a group of people is willing to deal with.

I agree that js world move fast but there is lot of reinvention of wheel and every new shiny thing have relatively small "payload". Also lot of things are just workarounds for js badparts. Currently I feel that js is out newest Java: clearly technically behind but since it has all the libraries it must be best forever. Of course ecosystem size has benefits but there more than just "they can't keep up with js". Es5 -> es6 -> elm, why bother with hot fixes when major update is available?

I agree, but at the same time I look at the Webassembly web page, and they explicitly state that replacing Javascript is not their objective. Why is that?

So the next generation can't have nice things either :).

It seems to me that the history of computing so far can be summarized as "due to popular demand, things have been used far outside their creator's intended scope, with 3-4 non-horrible results".

(Lisp is definitely one, can't think of another on the top of my head).

If only we had used Lisps for all the things!

We could have had Lisp instead of JS, but no, that would have worked too well; management wants Java. We almost had a Scheme instead of CSS: DSSSL, which could also do structural transformations of the document tree. But once again, no. The simplicity multiplied by the flexibility of a Lisp, equaled unacceptable complexity, for some strange definition of complexity.

XML looks like it really, really wanted to be a Lisp, what with its orderly nesting of tags. I almost wonder if XML stumbled and fell, due to the supporting pillars of parens being knocked out or corrupted, left, right and center.

To make an analogy, right now it's possible to write and include C++ modules in your Python scripts, just like it's possible to do with WASM/JS. But people still use Python, because it's a much faster/easier way to get a specific kind of thing done.

So WASM is a great tool, but not a good choice for building something like HN, where perf isn't an issue. Iteration speed, debuggability, and the GC make HTML/CSS/JS a better choice here.

It's not the overall objective but that's exactly the objective of a lot of people rooting for it. Think of how many people would be pissed off if they said "we're gonna try to replace javascript". Google did that with Dart and everyone gave them the finger... sunk cost fallacy.

Better to develop something for "performance" that just happens to be able to replace JS as a side benefit. Makes it a lot easier to swallow

So what you're saying is that WASM is a Trojan horse.

If you disagree with javascript losing dominance I guess you could say so. It's really just a way to make it easy to run whatever language you want in the browser in a cross-platform compatible way. I don't see this as a bad thing at all.

Something I ask in basically every WASM thread is: what is the conceptual difference between WASM ("good") and Java applets ("bad")? How does the system you describe differ from having the browser implement a JVM?

Java applets were unfortunately ahead of their time for the hardware available and got a bad reputation for being slow, along with security problems, and now that Google extinguished plugins like Java and Flash (Google gets to skip the Extend step) we're stuck with whatever Chrome lets webasm do with no competition for this kind of VM-in-a-browser. The homogenization Google forced on the web is a travesty but everybody is too distracted by shiny new HTML5 features and the anti-plugin bandwagon to care.

I'd assume something like the conceptual difference between HTML5 canvas/video ("good") and Flash ("bad"). No plugins. Better sandboxing. Open specification not owned by some specific company. An expectation of multiple competing implementations.

Basically, it's a lot of the same stuff, but a (hopefully) better implementation, and promoted in a way that appeals to the people likely to use it. Start with an old technology. Tweak, relabel, and market under the new name.

Java applets have a radically different security model from Javascript and wasm. There's only thing that makes wasm any closer to Java applets than Javascript already is- it's distributed as a bytecode that's not dynamically typed, rather than text.

But Javascript's dynamically typed textual representation has nothing to do with what makes it better than Java applets. It's the security model, which wasm shares.

Wouldn't it be easier to change the security model on Java applets than to go through whatever the process of developing wasm is?

Perhaps, but there are other benefits to wasm than "lacks Java applets' downsides"- JVM bytecode is locked into the Java object model and garbage collector, while wasm doesn't impose any particular style of memory management. This makes it far more straightforward to use in high-performance situations than Java can ever be.

Conceptually? It's not that different, and the only problems with Java were its implementation.

* Java was plagued with security problems. One area where Java really shot itself in the foot was that unsigned applets were sandboxed, but signed applets had unfettered access to everything, so you had to choose between signing and sandboxing. And then once security concerns became a big thing, Sun responded by killing support for unsigned applets saying it'll increase trust, but what they really did was make the problem worse by killing the sandbox.

* Java was proprietary until long after its star had fallen.

* Java was introduced when computers weren't that powerful. The JVM took forever to start up and would slow down your whole computer while running. Most of us kept Java disabled unless we had to use an applet for something just because of the massive performance hit.

You can make similar arguments about Flash, too: it too had security holes, proprietary software, and performance issues.

There is one thing I really liked about Java and Flash, though: you could turn it off. If you don't want a site loading some heavy Flash monstrosity and eating all your RAM (I had so many issues with Flash killing the RAM on my old laptop with only 512 MB of RAM), you could just turn plugins off or install an extension to force you to click to load Flash content. You can't do that with JavaScript, so maybe WASM will bring that part of the old days back too.

> you could just turn plugins off or install an extension to force you to click to load Flash content. You can't do that with JavaScript, so maybe WASM will bring that part of the old days back too.

NoScript?

I feel reasonably confident in predicting that WASM will have security holes and performance issues too. Computational demand always expands to fill the available performance.

Was there any point in the development of WASM where it made more sense to develop WASM to replace the JVM than it would have made to try fixing the problems with the JVM? Are we at that point now? It sounds like the last two problems fixed themselves.

Java applets were far too ahead of their time. Now that we actually have the bandwidth and computing power to support Applets they would be far superior than the Frankenstein of CSS, JS, and HTML we have now.

Applets were confined to a horrible UI toolkit instead of working natively with the DOM

People could be perfectly happy with today's performance levels (or tomorrow's, or yesterday's) if the prevailing systems were designed to serve and empower them, rather than to exploit them.

The market wants people to want "more features and faster execution." The market doesn't care what it's selling per se. If the web-browser-as-OS seems like an inevitability in that context, it's only a side-effect, and one that could change at any time.

WASM also impacts the labor market, as you mention. But it's not, as we might like to believe, because programmers' demands for more freedom and expressive power are being honored; it's because, as monkmartinez suggests [0] (and maybe this is what you mean by "floodgates"), companies would rather not be limited to a smaller human-resource pool when developing web properties.

If I sound a little dystopian, it might be because I'm currently reading Cyber-Marx [1], an insightful book from 1999 about the "information revolution" and its relation to capital.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342983

[1] http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/66mwg3pc9780252...

I'm a little confused by this comment. Are you saying it would be better for the world if companies were limited to a "smaller human-resource pool"? Does anyone besides JS devs benefit from that scenario?

Me too, but I am drawing a different conclusion. Perhaps he/she means that companies ultimately drive the market forward as it were. I mean, most people do not strictly trade time/effort for no reward. Reward can mean different things for different people, but I would tend to land on most people trade labor for money. Companies invest in tools all the time, especially internet companies. They would have the bigger reason to get behind efforts that increase the share of developers available.

Yes, I'm saying that this would not move forward without buy-in from non-programmers with influence. But language isn't the only thing. WASM is (correct me if I'm wrong) harder to reverse engineer, which must matter to those same stakeholders.

I don't see how it would be harder to RE than .NETs IL (which is pretty easy to RE), or even plain old assembly -- which looks horrible, but can be disassembled and even "decompiled" (which generates a potential C source from the disassembled bytecode).

I'm not entirely convinced that the reason why people aren't using their preferred language is due to the absence of WASM up until now.

Almost all of the popular programming language have a js transpiler allowing programmers to code in their lang and use it on web.

I think the reasons why programmers aren't using their preference when coding for web is, firstly because of the lack industry approval/support and secondly the speed of development. As much I complain about writing js code, it's a lot faster to get things done compared to Rust/C++.

You might be right about C++/Rust but I hear constant complaints from C#, Java, and Go devs about JS. It feels like about half of them would jump ship immediately given another choice. The truth is that even with all the advancements JS has made the tooling and features are still years behind some other mainstream languages.

The transpilers don't work that great and don't produce standard bytecode, in this regard WASM will be a game changer.

> Almost all of the popular programming language have a js transpiler allowing programmers to code in their lang and use it on web.

Because transpilers are an incredibly leaky abstraction. You have to know your language, the language you're transpiling to and quite often you need to know about how that translation occurs.

That's before you even get into the idiomatic differences between languages and libraries.

Alternate hypothesis: at least as of right now†, Web Workers still don't support thread-like behavior. If I wanted to program e.g. a game in C++ or Python, I'd be pulling in an engine and some libraries that all expect to have threads available. This code would not transpile.

You can write a native app in pretty much any language that can sit on top of the current web stack—but from the perspective of most programming languages, the result is very non-idiomatic code. Not only do you have to avoid consuming most of the library ecosystem of your language; you also have to code in the "Javascript style", with co-operatively scheduled async tasks running in a single execution-thread context (plus maybe some memory-isolated "secondary process"-like execution-threads you have to do message-passing IPC against) in order to make your native code "work" in a web browser after transpilation.

If we clear that hurdle, using arbitrary languages for the web will be a lot easier, and you'll see far more porting of native apps to the web.

† https://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/pthre...

At the very least, browsers are the new JRE.

I'm very interested in the possibility of using a WASM VM as a unit of process isolation in an operating system. I actually kind of like Babel-compiled JavaScript, so I'm not as interested in WASM as a way to "get away from JavaScript", but the VM-based containerization possibilities (maybe with hardware-assist) are very cool.

Looks like Docker/Unikernel Systems actually has plans to build something like this: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/tree/master/projects/mi...