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dang
DonHopkins
MY GOD WHY WON'T IT JUST STAY DEAD???
mikece
When announcements are made at Google I/O about UI and app code being compiled down to WASM, without a line of Javascript in sight, and delivered on all manner of web browser -- desktop and mobile -- that triggers a reminder that this was all predicted by the clairvoyant Gary Berhardt back in 2014.
He also predicted a huge war after the adoption of (W)ASM and we have the possible ignition point for that in eastern Ukraine at the moment...
ssss11
At this point it should perhaps be renamed ZombieScript
chrisco255
I think it's pretty hilarious that after this talk, WebAssembly became a thing, supplanting asm.js, and the text based version of wasm files are called wat files. Wat?
woodruffw
Gary Bernhardt is a fantastic speaker and presenter. I also highly recommend his Destroy All Software screencasts[1], for those who enjoyed this talk.
gregsadetsky
And he also runs his own learning site/platform where you can interactively learn / get better at TypeScript.
I went through a few of the classes and loved them!
agentultra
Gosh I remember being at this talk. And I remember being in the green room at a subsequent Pycon as a speaker and seeing Gary preparing for another talk. He is legendary. I wish I had the fortitude to interrupt him and introduce myself. Or not. I kinda just left him to his own because interrupting people is rude.
If you’re reading this, hi Gary! You’re cool. This talk was awesome. You did a great job.
mikece
Almost ten years on from this conference talk and it's mind-blowing how close to the mark Gary Bernhardt was!
zaguios
Uh, are we living in the same world? Javascript completely and fully dominates the web, he couldn't have been more wrong about how the future would turn out.
kaelinl
Have you watched the talk or only read the title? The "death" in the title does not mean what you suggest it does.
NortySpock
To summarize the talk for those in a hurry: the presenter, pretending to be from the future, describes YavaScript as an archaic computer language that served as a bootstrap to WASM, which is now the default compilation target for nearly all languages.
undefined
recursive
> Javascript completely and fully dominates the web, he couldn't have been more wrong about how the future would turn out.
So what was he wrong about?
ehnto
I guess just that asm.js nor WASM are the reason why Javascript still dominates. Most of the dominating technologies transpile to plain ol' javascript.
slowmovintarget
To refer merely to the title of another of his talks: "Wat?"
throwawaymaths
It's not nearly 100% certain wasm will win out in the way he describes. And there isn't an exclusion zone.
sfink
> And there isn't an exclusion zone.
Yet.
flohofwoe
The software world hasn't changed much in the last decade though. I think you have to go back all the way before V8 to make the predictions impressive ;)
roberja90
Fun talk but kind of weird he totally ignores the fact that LLMs have written all code since around 2029.
evbogue
First time viewer here.
How did the presenter know there was going to be a war going on between 2020 and 2025 all of the way back in 2014?
nilsbunger
The talk is in 2035, not 2014
glandium
Has there been a time between 2014 and now where there wasn't an active war somewhere?
madeofpalk
> This science fiction / comedy / completely serious talk traces the history of JavaScript, and programming in general, from 1995 until 2035.
mikece
Like everything else he's correct, just off by a couple years: The War wasn't until 2027.
chii
he obviously was really a time traveller, and was just using the talk as a thinly disguised prophesy for the rest of us!
FpUser
This is insanely brilliant presentation. Too bad I did not hear about the guy before.
baudaux
This excellent talk was a fiction in 2014… that is becoming true. Of course JavaScript is not dead (far from that) but WebAssembly is now there and a shell running in the browser becomes a reality
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Related:
The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27538040 - June 2021 (43 comments)
The Birth and Death of JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26696857 - April 2021 (1 comment)
The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622984 - March 2021 (2 comments)
The Birth and Death of JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19147184 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
The Birth and Death of JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11898573 - June 2016 (1 comment)
The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687 - April 2014 (227 comments)