Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave1010uk | Hacker News Reader

I remember when the iPad first came out and I (along with many others) were concerned that it was a device for consumption and not creation: the first step in the "war" on general-purpose computation. However, with the continual improvements in web browsers and JavaScript runtimes (as well as things like Emscriptrn) I'm far less concerned. Nowadays even a locked down phone can run any JavaScript, which may provide the user with an IDE or a secure messaging system. I still think there's a war but I think it's more at the network level rather than device level.

View on HN

I think your optimistic view misses something important: nomatter how well browsers can execute JS, it's not truly general purpose computing as long as the stuff beneath the browser - from OS to hardware - is out of your control.

It's great that the in-browser ecosystem is expanding and improving, but IMO we will still lose The War if we cannot tell our chips to do whatever we want. I hope we won't settle for the browser when we can and should have it all.

> it's not truly general purpose computing as long as the stuff beneath the browser - from OS to hardware - is out of your control.

By that standard the state of general-purpose computing has been steadily improving as the most popular computing platform has moved from Windows--which is closed-source--to Android, which is open-source.

I'm not so sure. There seems to be an unwillingness to consider phones general purpose (which isn't that strange, since not long ago they were indeed special purpose). Just look at the acceptance of vendor lockdowns.

If everyone moves to iPads and iPhones, no amount of Emscripten will address the problem that the browser doesn't have access to the actual hardware. No talking to bluetooth devices, no talking to the GPU, no ad-hoc wifi communication with other devices, etc.

Mozilla and Google have been pushing on exposing more features like that to the web browser, but that's something Apple seems uninterested in (because it diminishes the importance of their App Store)

> Google have been pushing on exposing more features

Of course they have. This increases the importance of their services. No matter which side the consumer purchases from, both sides of that coin have pros/cons & warts/polish.

Well, single or "reduced" purpose computers have existed long before the iPad or modern smartphones. Game consoles, audio players, video players go way back...

It makes engineering and economic sense to have devices dedicated to specific purposes, since economy of scale and optimization can produce devices that are better at that specific function than a general purpose one, at a cheaper price point.

Devices like the tablets or smartphones address the need of many people to have a subset of a general-purpose computer (messaging, web browsing, media player) without the added overhead of having to manage a full-fledged computer.

Functionality that for years has been available mostly on general purpose computers has become so commonplace and necessary that a (huge) market for devices streamlining the experience has opened up.

I don't think general purpose computer will disappear any time soon, if anything computers have gotten cheaper, more powerful and, yes, more free.

The choice of a computation platform (from a raspberry pi to an eight core server, or maybe an eight core server in the cloud to which you ssh with your raspberry pi), OS (OSX, Windows, a gazillion Linux distributions...), programming language, availability of knowledge has never been greater.

Whether you consume or create with a computer is only passingly related to the runtime the applications run in; the real differentiating factor is how you use it. It's immaterial that Javascript is well supported or not on Android or iOS; what's material is how software evolves under the interface constraints.

A computer could live entirely inside a web browser and be useless for creation; just as a computer could have no web browser at all and be a content creator's dream.

There are plenty of arguments for the Javascript/DOM/&c. stack as an application framework -- that they're somehow more better at creation isn't one of them.

I was concerned too, but even with general purpose computing devices readily available, for the last decade most people have been using them like oversized tablets, barely knowing anything about how they work or how to fix them when they break. The curious among us will always have the avenue of creation open to us (after all, who otherwise would create the newest apps and websites?) and it's not like all the literature is being burned and destroyed.

Perhaps its our duty to make even better tools and resources available to those who want create and produce in the age of tablets, and to create alternate platforms that don't include walled gardens and locked-down app stores.

I don't see how being confined to a subset of programming is a good thing. To always depend on what features your overseers are willing to make available to you.

So what if a locked down phone can run JavaScript? I can do a ToDo-list app?

Running Javascript is arguably not that important to an "open device", we need a full compiler that goes down to native code and can access system internals.

Yes, I don't know why Haskell or a Python interpreter (coming from their own free software teams) are not available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com