[bamboleo]

I feel the same for the browser environment. Other than a few new “exciting” APIs and canvas, developing for the browser is essentially still the same deal.

I’m tired of hacking documents into apps. I want the web to be split into Markdown-like web (i.e. pure content and some meta) and actual web apps that work like native apps.

I want Accept: application/web

[Jetrel]

I mean, if you'd like to put it in perspective, try developing for IE6. You don't even have a dev console.

I had a recent revelation when watching a video someone posted of a Symbolics Lisp machine, and its legendary dev environment. That being - it's basically just a modern browser devtools, but for the whole OS. Turtles all the way down.

But somehow, despite having the bird in our hand, we as an industry lost them, and regressed to having vastly-inferior tools to those Symbolics devtools, and only gradually rebuilt them over the course of multiple decades.

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As a harsh rebuttal to the OP article; I think the number one thing that's "whooshing" over that guy's head is that if someone develops a proof-of-concept for something, it doesn't invalidate the far-more-significant trick of making it widespread. Often it's the latter that's far more difficult, because it requires eliminating compromises that weren't acceptable to people before.

The strange thing about the software industry these days is that quite a few "truisms" about software development have been completely invalidated. Ironclad laws of how the world works have slowly been rendered completely false, and it's happened not through some sudden eureka development but through some slow, sneaky, iterative improvement. The same sort of thing i.e. that made solar cheaper than coal, or made SSDs cheaper than HDDs (I don't know if we've actually crossed that line yet, but it seems pretty inevitable that once the investment impetus behind HDDs collapses, we'll eventually get there). Flatscreens versus CRTs was another great example.

[infinite8s]

What 'truisms' about software development do you think have been completely invalidated?

[sime2009]

I don't know how far back your view on web development goes, but the approach from 20 years ago really was documents being thrown around and lots of forms with a little bit of JS. That was hacking documents into apps.

Today's approach for building web apps is basically code up a fat client application which downloads to the browser, runs, and talks to some remote web API (i.e. REST) using JSON. This is much closer to native apps and very far from the document approach. The app and the pure content are cleanly split between the initial app bundle and the web APIs.