[LinguaBrowse]

> I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser

Not so much! Rhino was an effort to rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java, and I expect that if that rewrite had taken off, Java might've gained a foothold (though indeed, there were Java applets for a time).

There were also Flash apps, and of course there are some significant games based on WebAssembly and low-level graphics APIs.

But ultimately JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic, allowing you to be less rigid in how you architect things. And by being a scripting language, it's super quick to iterate on.

[breve]

> JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic

Amazon moved to WebAssembly for their Prime Video application for both higher and less variable performance:

https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-...

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/

[hajile]

Java was never going to replace JS in a practical way because of security and the Java JIT taking forever to load and warm up.

[righthand]

I was being sarcastic in my post. I find bragging about Javascript as a flourishing UI language omitting quite a bit about why.

[LinguaBrowse]

Eh, writing is hard!

[righthand]

And how!