[_sabe_]

Let grandpa tell you a story...

Once upon a time Javascript was this fragmented language, mostly associated with blinking effects, pop-ups and lame attempts to protect a web page from being viewed as pure HTML. After years of misery the community was tired of how things was and said, "No more"! And so html-tables and javascript was sent to a zip-drive (you probably won't remember those, think of it like a SD-card) to never be seen on the web again.

But evil people who sold out to the dark forces was destined to bring javascript back. By making frameworks they masked the incompatibilities of the language, making it seem like a friend. And the young people who never fought the war, they welcomed this new technology with open arms.

But seriously, we took a typesetting language made for writing documents (just like word) and turn it into a technology for making software. It turned out into a total mess, and now you wonder why taking a language made for manipulating the DOM and using it for manipulating the stack is a bad idea? "When all you have is a hammer..."?

[davidpardo]

Twenty years ago I read exactly the same about using the abomination that was perl/CGI instead of the so called correct C. And history tells us that the prototypes that were made to test the concept where, most of the times, good enough to stop further development in the academic way. This product (or a similar one) can empower lots of people in ways that we cannot imagine yet. Not all hardware has to be made by hundreds of thousands and be able to tinker with real world devices will be a bigger asset than we think right now. The web we know now hasn't been developed from tall towers but from the trenches. New ideas will flourish and then great developers will be needed to optimize, refine and scale projects that will change our view. At least that's what I hope.

[camus]

Perl is still horrible... and more people write C than Perl i can guarantee you.

[davidpardo]

You didn't address any of my points. Perl may have been horrible, line noise or a read only language, but 20 years ago was the quickest way to write a visitor book or a mailform. You could do it in C but didn't, just because you didn't need to. If the perl prototype was good enough, you could use it in production, and thousands of sites started to build whole e-commerce systems and found they worked.

Thad was a tipping point for the web, and the world now is different just because of that.

If you have to choose between power and easiness of development, most people will choose the later, and if I can try a new hardware board that doesn't force me to learn anything new, I'd probably try it.

[Apocryphon]

Where were you to warn us when HN was going Node-crazy in the last 2-3 years?

[striker44]

ahhh zip disks. i remember that wonderful invention.. from 1.44 to 100mb on a disk?! pity their heyday didn't last long!