Stiff asks, great programmers answer (2006)

When it's right, it's amazing foresight; when it's wrong, no-one remembers.

I wouldn't say it's foresight, more like recognizing a trend.

By 2006 I worked as an intern in a company that made rich web based apps, basically a competitor to Google Spreadsheets if you will. There were numerous startups doing similar stuff. It was basically a mainstream thing.

At the time I remember a bunch of people mocking up desktop environments inside a browser -- not necessarily useful but it was one of the fun things to do with the capabilities of the browser. AJAX was the cool tech that everybody wanted to use.

I don't think anyone at the time could have foreseen that Javascript would become the sophisticated mess with new frameworks displacing the existing ones every other year, but browser-side programming displacing traditional UI toolkits was well on the way by then.

2006 was the hey day of flash games, so the moving to browser part was already pretty clear, but that it would be web based APIs less so. canvas was still new/didn't work very well back then iirc.

It was half a year after the launch of Google docs, pretty sure many had similar views at the time. Feels like the browser side peaked at the time and we are still about there, at least among the stuff I use there isn't anything more complicated than google docs still today 15 years later.

This insight came even before the V8 JS engine was out. Dude was spot-on

It is simple. Emacs is an editor made by programmers for programmers. If you are the type that likes to tinker with things, Emacs is going to be the editor for you to tinker with and automate whatever you want.

sometimes he lurks by, maybe you (and we)'ll have an answer