which may be relaxed in the future as WebASM evolves

WASM (as it is more commonly known) might serve well as a functional core, but you still need to use JS APIs to do any useful work, and I don't believe there's any plan to change that. My understanding is that JS will continue to be an important part of anything built on the web platform, no matter how much leverage you're able to get from WASM.

The two main things that will distinguish the next generation of programming languages is 1) creating an ecosystem of interchangeable parts, and 2) drastically reducing the chance for error by the human programmer

I'd wager that if you took a survey of folks in this Slack — people who have spent considerable portions of their careers considering these exact issues — you'd find a spectrum of people who vary from strong agreement to strong disagreement with that statement. I, personally, am so far on one end that I'd say I "stringly disagree" with that statement, in that I feel that there's plenty of room for, and benefit to be had from, a return to TCL-style string-based metaprogramming. More, looser dynamism. But I know, without any doubt, that that is just my opinion.

I'd be shocked if the next generation of programming languages were unified under any one umbrella. That's happened before, sure, but I expect it to get rarer as our technology matures. Rather, as the recent news about Cables and Nodes shows, we should expect every current approach to be furthered equally.

If your code doesn't work, it doesn't matter how pretty/fun it was to make.

There's an implication here that JS doesn't work. Was that your intent?

They have delivered more than a million to 1 price/performance improvement over the last 25 years. Can software even claim 10:1 improvement over the last 25 years?

This is totally an apples-to-oranges comparison for a tremendous number of reasons, but I will offer one angle of consideration that makes the mistake of taking your claim seriously: The number of people who are writing software now.. who are even able to write software.. has grown much, much faster than the number of people who are able to make their own hardware. Make of that what you will.

I've never heard any mention that there'd be a move to design Web APIs primarily for WASM. I can't point to anything specific, just the impression I got time and again following the "extensible web manifesto" crowd.

But I don't know that all, or even most, features that it makes sense to add to the browser would so cleanly have a foot in both camps.

Depends on who you ask I suppose... But I've certainly heard plenty of people who wholeheartedly hope that the day you can write your web frontend without ever thinking about js isn't too far off. They certainly see the value in every web API having first class wasm support

Regardless, the fact that WASM exists as an alternative doesn't address the argument that JS is an "intrinsically fragile" language, and thus that it's folly to base Future Of Programming tools on JS. Why can't all the following be true? • JS is a loose, dynamic, even sloppy language • You can build valuable systems atop JS • You can include support for JS in your Future-Programming tool, and that can be a good thing

Why does the first point (or other similar) render the following points (or other similar) invalid?