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Microsoft's API churn must be disconcerting for developers trying to figure out what to standardize on going forward. This is yet another API for writing Windows apps. WPF? Silverlight? HTML5? I would always have a fear that something else would come along and supplant the API I was working with.

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I'm guessing bringing HTML5 support for their APIs is only going to bring more developers to their platform. I may be proven wrong as time goes.

Its a tangential example to be sure, but it seems to have worked out really really well for Google Chrome and their extensions.

I haven't been this excited about a windows release in a long long while ... I hope Microsoft doesn't botch this

I wouldn't say it's a tangential example as much as that Chrome extensions have a very good reason to be written in JavaScript--they're effectively contributions to the JavaScript of the page, and use the same DOM.

It remains to be seen if the other benefits of JavaScript carry over to Windows 8 enough that it's worth using it to code desktop apps. As for botching it, I suspect that Windows 8 will be a not-very-good «experimental» thing like Vista and Windows 9 will be what Windows 8 should have been in the first place.

Yeah. It has been a mess for a long time. In the end, though, C/C++ is still the main API and it will probably stay like that.

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