[cromwellian]

* The fallacy of the excluded middle, yawn.

You're an executive of Mozilla. I think you can join threads without being condescending.

As for whether developers are buying PNaCL, asm.js, Dart, or even Javascript, as a major platform for games development remains to be seen. The majority of the game-dev resources are being spent on native, and those that are developing for mobile, are doing so for native. If Javascript is lucky, it might one day be as popular as Flash for doing games, it hasn't even reached 1/100th of the success of the FlashVM in that regard.

There is a lot of time spent on HN arguing over JS vs Dart vs NaCL, meanwhile, the consumer experience is being taken over by native, and it is not because of JIT performance. Failure to see why developers choose native, and why consumers choose it, I think is a tragic tunnel vision.

[BrendanEich]

More executive charm school needed, clearly.

You wrote a tl;dr piece with a whopper in the middle asserting that we should all go work on other perf than JS perf that is attracting game publishers, big ones -- while at the same time, Google is pushing *NaCl (both with and without the P) / PPAPI as the way to get native code including those very games ported to Chrome and Chrome OS.

I think that's at least the false dilemma fallacy I identified, if not something more like a conflict of interest, and I'm gonna say so. Bluntly.

I frankly don't care whether game devs ever hand-code in JS or Dart. They'll continue to use C++ for good reasons (until the Rust-pocalypse). GC is never free, nor is JIT. C++ and other AOT languages endure.

Really, it's not for us to over-sell JS and require rewrites.

And again, Google apparently gets this market need because they have been selling NaCl against it (with limited success). So it's not out of bounds for JS suddenly, in spite of your tl;dr protests.

/be

[cromwellian]

It's incorrect to view Google as a single entity. There's a large number of engineers each with their own ideas of what should be done, and Google gives a lot of resources for people to explore things. To say that Google is pushing something can only really be understood in context of how much company level priority and head count is put on it vs individual loudness and passion of the teams doing their things.

Some very small teams at Google who work on stuff as 20% side projects are so vocal and active with the external community that they give the impression of huge focus and investment. Others, while mostly quiet, give the impression of almost no investment while large groups of people churn away.

My interests are aligned with preserving and maintaining what is good about the Web: federation, transparency, frictionlessness, indexability, composeablity, linkability, etc. I am more focused about avoiding this future (http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com/). To me the trend towards appification and install of everything is something we should not be chasing. Ideally, web apps should trend towards less code execution, not more.

The first two decades of the Web were mostly about content. Now we're turning it into an entertainment device and a gaming platform, it's this generation's television. Everyone is chasing off into the bandwagon/rathole of trying to be more like iOS apps, because of the perception that it's how you make money. That gravy train will eventually saturate and become a dead end. It's short term thinking. Skate towards where the puck will be or should be, not chasing Apple down the field trying to catch their lead skater.

Long term I want the Web to "win", but not by changing into a platform of binary opaque blobs like native.

[BrendanEich]

Great comment -- with you all the way on this one.

I use "they" for Google on purpose, it's a fleet of ships for sure. But I also confer with my VP Engineering, Chrome counterpart regularly and know (mostly) what projects are official and intentional. :-)

/be