throwawaysbdi

So wasm is a bytecode format like Java or C#'s IL except it basically has no runtime?

Why don't we just use an existing bytecode format and skip all the pointless design? LLVM? Android DEX? Java Class or C# IL formats aren't enough? Hell if we use one of those bytecode formats we could reuse the runtime too!

I'm sure there's probably 20+ bytecode formats and I'm rolling my eyes that we need yet another for the web....

Is it just me or do Java applets seem like they were way the hell ahead of their time?

If the sandbox didn't have so many holes in it Java applets were arguably better for webapps than the unholy mess we've cobbled together over the last ten years to replace them.

It's sad to me that Java fell out of the browser and was replaced with a slow non standardized single threaded shit language for almost ten years just because Java didn't have DOM access.

JavaScript is just nearing Java feature parity and still not anywhere close for performance.

And I'll tell you what Java didn't have. A unfathomable clusterfuck of module systems, transpilers, shit build tools and IDE support, crazy syntax gotchas, unholy and inconsistent exception handling systems. God dammit what have we done.

Shakes cane at neighborhood kids

I don't get why this isn't obvious. Software is seen as the wild west of engineering. Exciting, competitive, reckless, sometimes brutal.

It's like Wall Street, selling cars, working oilfields. The popular perception has been fuelled by megafounders who struck gold, becoming the richest people in the world by their mid 20's. SV is in a 40 gold rush for the next big thing and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.

For all sorts of reasons that have been beaten to death, most women won't stick around in such a field.

For gender balance to return in our lifetimes software engineering would need to lose much of the existing culture

It's likely that the RNG's in slots don't produce uniformly distributed wins and losses except over long timeframes.

A machine that's truly random will result in everyone losing money slowly and reliably after a large number of pulls. So not fun. A machine built to have the odds wander around over a period of time will be more unpredictable with a greater earnings spread

Its absurd for the highest paid employee to be paid more than 10x the lowest.

It's not like a CEO is a hundred times smarter than the people one level below. The reality is that any of the executives could do the same job. At larger companies, what the hell is the difference between managing a division of 500 people or the whole company of 2500? Once you get to numbers that big it doesn't make a difference.

Everything old sucks, but there's fixable and unfixable suckage.

IMO stuff like old PHP sites are fixable suckage. Usually minimal layers of abstraction and no crazy hooks affecting the vanilla behavior of the browser and HTTP. If they used libraries, it's usually for small stuff and they can be replaced without rewriting swaths of code. I can generally add new widgets to existing pages without fucking with what's there.

Webforms is a good example of unfixable suckage. The abstraction away from how the page and HTTP works is so thick that it's impossible to refactor slowly. Like angular, webforms takes over the page lifecycle. Client side code and MVC patterns just don't work nicely with it. I can't add anything to webforms pages outside of webforms because all these page reloads happen at unpredictable times and I can't stop them without breaking everything.

Every time I work on a webforms site with user complaints the most reasonable solution is to scrap it and start over. At least with other old shit that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel I can cordon off the really bad stuff and refactor

Political realities can ruin your reputation with some customers. The business goal is to maximize profits even if that means not hiring black people in the southern US, or LGBT in Russia for example

Eh, if you're using TLS it really doesn't matter where you hash. There's a lot of arguments for not doing secure hashing and encryption in JavaScript

It sucks but places like Walmart have been doing this for ages

Angular feels like Google's GWT (Google Web Toolkit) re imagined in JavaScript.

It's not bad by any means but the layer of abstraction is too thick for my taste. Like GWT or Rails, Angular makes easy stuff trivial but you start chafing against the framework if you're doing things angular was not designed to do.

TLDR: It's going to suck working on ng2 apps 15 years from now.

I'm weary of building things in it because, IMO, the biggest downside of all encompassing frameworks that gives you lots of abstraction is that they age really badly.

I've been burned over the years by a bunch of these. What you run into is applications that can't be gracefully updated. When you're entire app is tied to a jumbo framework and it gets outdated or abandoned you pretty much have to throw the app away and start over.

In the big corporate environments that angular seems aimed at you can count on applications hanging around for 15-20 years. I would much rather maintain something modular that I can slowly swap out as needed than a monolith. Something built with a react clone and 5-10 standalone libraries is going to be a lot easier to update than a 20 year old version of angular some day

The free market optimizes in a way that isn't "fair". Young people are measurably quicker thinking and willing to work longer hours for less pay. They cost the company less in insurance and sick pay as well. Young males tend not to have familial responsibilities and don't get pregnant.

Then you have race, where hiring white people is seen as the safest option for the business because they generally aren't discriminated against. It minimizes the risk of your company getting a bad reputation with certain groups, and minimizes the risk of lawsuits when you need to fire people.

With business the market isn't cultural as much as it's about maximizing profitability. That still doesn't make it fair.