To make an analogy, right now it's possible to write and include C++ modules in your Python scripts, just like it's possible to do with WASM/JS. But people still use Python, because it's a much faster/easier way to get a specific kind of thing done.

So WASM is a great tool, but not a good choice for building something like HN, where perf isn't an issue. Iteration speed, debuggability, and the GC make HTML/CSS/JS a better choice here.

So the next generation can't have nice things either :).

It seems to me that the history of computing so far can be summarized as "due to popular demand, things have been used far outside their creator's intended scope, with 3-4 non-horrible results".

(Lisp is definitely one, can't think of another on the top of my head).

If only we had used Lisps for all the things!

We could have had Lisp instead of JS, but no, that would have worked too well; management wants Java. We almost had a Scheme instead of CSS: DSSSL, which could also do structural transformations of the document tree. But once again, no. The simplicity multiplied by the flexibility of a Lisp, equaled unacceptable complexity, for some strange definition of complexity.

XML looks like it really, really wanted to be a Lisp, what with its orderly nesting of tags. I almost wonder if XML stumbled and fell, due to the supporting pillars of parens being knocked out or corrupted, left, right and center.

It's not the overall objective but that's exactly the objective of a lot of people rooting for it. Think of how many people would be pissed off if they said "we're gonna try to replace javascript". Google did that with Dart and everyone gave them the finger... sunk cost fallacy.

Better to develop something for "performance" that just happens to be able to replace JS as a side benefit. Makes it a lot easier to swallow

So what you're saying is that WASM is a Trojan horse.

If you disagree with javascript losing dominance I guess you could say so. It's really just a way to make it easy to run whatever language you want in the browser in a cross-platform compatible way. I don't see this as a bad thing at all.

<excessive snark deleted>