[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.