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by dion.
Original Post: Wasabi for the Web? Ah Joel.
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Joel has a new look at the future via history in his Strategy Letter VI where he waxes lyrically about how HTML/CS/JS is going to have something higher up that targets it as a platform (a la C -> assembly).
Of course, we already have a bunch of options there, including GWT.... which is a little ironic since Joel discusses how Gmail is going to be destroyed by a company that builds "NewSDK". Maybe he means that Gmail will get beaten by... Gmail++?
There are some flaws here:
He talks about how NewSDK is from a company that will be the next Microsoft. Of course, most of the NewSDKs are different beasts these days (e.g. GWT is given away for free)
He assumes that the Gmail team is drinking coffee and not making the product better
He assumes that the way to make this web stuff quick is via NewSDK, when in fact there are many efforts such as Tamarin that are making JavaScript run very fast right now. It isn't like people are going to be surprised that the JavaScript runtimes get a lot faster pretty soon
I think that his Wasabi mind makes him think that these cross compilers are the solution to everything, and they need to be created by small companies like FogCreek ;)
I think his vision of not having to think about cross-browser issues is important: "And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be."
It's either (something like) that or continue wasting lots of time and money trying (and failing) to get things to work consistently. And being restricted in what you can do because of cross-browser issues.
Eventually the bean-counters are going to notice and demand a more economical solution.
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