I'm disappointed there wasn't more written here about Javascript, and more broadly, the web browser. The browser is the platform of the modern era, and Javascript is the strongest example of a programming language being an "authoring tool".
Web apps carry the weight of ecommerce, entertainment, social media, etc. The fact that those apps are frequently at the center of political debate and pop culture underscores their broader success far beyond the discussions that only developers understand.
Along with the HTML and CSS, the code written for the corporate web is not up to the developers alone. You can't ship anything until it's been through far more review by non-technical stakeholders than the devs using other languages may get away with. Yes the quality can vary, but when it's bad it reveals the dysfunction of the organization in a very public way. There's so much cross-discipline human involvement that the developers are in roles that resemble a bureaucrat more than a programmer.
The web is merely a small interface substrate. Spread wide sure, but the bulk of the work is shouldered by the backend. I think if there’s a true winner of the web era, it is languages like Java, C#, Ruby, PHP, and Python. There are many codebases tied to those more than they are tied to the UI written in JavaScript.
I completely agree with your premise. JavaScript and the browser represent the quintessential modern authoring platform.
I actually wanted to write more about JavaScript, but the problem was that there were fewer cohesive, codified sources to cite than I expected. When writing about this kind of historical narrative, the first issue is always whether there are books you can cite.
JS has undergone organic changes along with the turbulent history of the web itself, but there's no clearly organized history of those changes.(To be more precise, it's not that there are none, but rather that the web environment was so fragmented in its early days, and each piece had its own history. Describing all of it would have required too much time)
There is Allen Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich's 'JavaScript: The First 20 Years,' but it's so lengthy that I couldn't read all of it, so I had to cite only what I had actually read. That's why I ended up cutting a lot of the JS content. I completely agree with your point, but I hope you understand it was a matter of length constraints.
Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.
Classism has a way to go for the overkill. I don‘t think the post-modern interpretation is 100% correct... I think this is more complex and nuanced, but your rebuttal is not very good.
Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.
When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.
Yes, but why does someone need to be of a different socioeconomic class to have prioritization skills? I'm just saying they have the extra burden of consequences for prioritizing school.
I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.
In 2026, everything is server side. Serve your DOM updates encoded in JSON if you want. Personally, I find serving them in HTML to be less of a hassle.
I mean a radically different view is that the SERVER should just give you the data and process your requests, without necessarily caring much about what you are - a browser or some other automated system, or a desktop client, where each has vastly different preferences on how the content might get displayed or used.
With that approach, a clear API in the middle and a SPA on the client side makes a bunch of sense (as long as you don't make some chimera of hydration and pre-rendering and server-side components while pretending that it's still a SPA and it "just works" while your server is coupled to the client).
Of course, what you actually need depends on your circumstances and sometimes even preferences. For a bunch of internal or personal stuff, SSR can be really nice and simple!
I think when we're talking about mature software, LLMs aren't the problem. It's the lack of discussion justifying the change. LLMs don't necessarily lower code quality. They put a spotlight on people "just going through the motions".
When the changes are small and properly reviewed, there's no point in caring how it was done. It should be trivial to write, but difficult to approve and merge.
Projects as significant as Debian should own the fact that they are indeed a bureaucracy and take inspiration from what has always worked long before LLMs.
I think a much better metric is the results of the compensation, not the peak dollars earned for some narrow window of time. The differences in the cost of living and local economic inflation can become that significant in the long run.
I'm not sure I would call an appetite for risk a "talent", or even a natural consequence of talent.
If we look at the average case, there are plenty of millennials now turning 40 who have higher net worth and a better work-life balance precisely because they never worked for a FAANG. Can't argue with the results of sticking around somewhere and climbing the ladder the traditional way versus enduring all the job hopping, glass ceilings, and layoffs.
I'm skeptical that this is true with respect to net worth, given that I have worked at both FAANG and non-FAANG companies and I know what I got paid at one vs the other.
Commercial services have always been a thinly-veiled bureaucracy long before we even had computers. The move to the web just made them more powerful.
From that perspective, LLMs are a weapon meant to disrupt their power and shake out the businesses that are too weak to resist or too dumb to see the threat. It's not about "solving" code, but weakening the competition enough that they sell out or go away. The code is still as valuable as any other proprietary information, operations, plans, etc.
I wish we had failure stats like this across all models and for all attempted use cases, not just these vague and common criticisms. It would really help the end users decide which AI models are worth using for their projects, if any.
It would make it a lot easier to ignore most of the insane promises and pointless arguing. I do think LLMs have potential, but not while it's still being advertised as general intelligence or whatever politically charged scifi nonsense that makes the chronically online salivate.
Considering the amount of investment involved and disillusionment, the public will be demanding this soon anyway. I am looking forward to it.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I can't think of anything dumber than all the tedious work forced upon people by "the telephone game" and a lack of oversight. That's intrinsic to any office.
They had a capability and then immediately demanded it be used as soon as possible. No deeper thinking is required.
There was very little incentive to force the moves you're claiming Apple intended to. You've got it backwards. This is exactly how Jobs' "reality distortion field" actually worked. People would overthink every time he was wrong or flat out didn't give a shit. His overrated status compelled people to make things so, and you're falling for it like they did.
> Sony and all the previous big labels just did digital uploads of their catalog instead of ripping CDs like cavemen. For the 2nd-phase rollout of iTunes Store in October 2003 with 400,000 songs, Apple could have had CD Baby and other small indies use the same effortless transfer process as the Big Labels but for whatever reason, Steve Jobs treated them differently.
Did you ever consider that it was "effortless" for the big labels because they invented the formats iTunes used along with all the guidelines for how uploads should work? Why wouldn't iTunes take their lead instead of the other way around? The goal is to get this shit out the door now and make money. The big label archives already had things in the right formats and properly audited to be consistent, or they had the means for a quicker turnaround if they didn't. Of course it would be massively easier for everyone except the indie labels.
Web apps carry the weight of ecommerce, entertainment, social media, etc. The fact that those apps are frequently at the center of political debate and pop culture underscores their broader success far beyond the discussions that only developers understand.
Along with the HTML and CSS, the code written for the corporate web is not up to the developers alone. You can't ship anything until it's been through far more review by non-technical stakeholders than the devs using other languages may get away with. Yes the quality can vary, but when it's bad it reveals the dysfunction of the organization in a very public way. There's so much cross-discipline human involvement that the developers are in roles that resemble a bureaucrat more than a programmer.
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