[klodolph]

Yes, you paid a tax. But my argument here is that the tax for writing in different languages on Win32, Unix, and Mac OS was far cheaper than the tax for writing in other languages on a Lisp machine. This is because translating low-level code to high-level code is not as straightforward as the reverse operation. For example, if I compile C to JavaScript, how do I even think about writing a function like memcpy()? You end up with a monster like asm.js where interacting with the DOM is a chore.

Yes, the web brought a renaissance in different languages. But we already had a bunch of different languages lying around when the web became important. We were already using different languages to write desktop software. I didn't even learn C until the late 1990s, but I was happily writing software before then.

WebAssembly is going to make languages other than JavaScript palatable in the browser, and I can only see that as a good thing.