Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird...
by kaba0 on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @04:12AM
(#28536549)
> Understadingly people didn't just say "let's suffer them for 10 years until the hardware catches up to make them tolerable".
It’s funny because that is essentially what happened. Other than flash (which suffered essentially from the same shortcomings as applets, but at least had a productive environment to create them), there was nothing that replaced these technologies for many years to come. Canvas rendering came much later and only with much more recent browsers did it have acceptable performance. It is not accident that many people long for the old web which was strangely more interactive in some cases than what we have today.
Don’t get me wrong, java applets were shitty. But we sort of threw it all away instead of fixing it, which in hindsight seems to have been an easier road (since the JVM has always been the state of the art runtime, and JS engines had to catch up from zero). DOM integration into an object oriented language would have been much easier than what webassembly does through JS bindings, and lack of security was frankly more of a mindset back then, and the jvm could have been sandboxed just as “easily”* as js engines are.
* it is a hard thing to do, but it happened to JS engines because the money was there. Integrating the JVM with proper sandboxing would have required less money/energy.
It’s funny because that is essentially what happened. Other than flash (which suffered essentially from the same shortcomings as applets, but at least had a productive environment to create them), there was nothing that replaced these technologies for many years to come. Canvas rendering came much later and only with much more recent browsers did it have acceptable performance. It is not accident that many people long for the old web which was strangely more interactive in some cases than what we have today.
Don’t get me wrong, java applets were shitty. But we sort of threw it all away instead of fixing it, which in hindsight seems to have been an easier road (since the JVM has always been the state of the art runtime, and JS engines had to catch up from zero). DOM integration into an object oriented language would have been much easier than what webassembly does through JS bindings, and lack of security was frankly more of a mindset back then, and the jvm could have been sandboxed just as “easily”* as js engines are.
* it is a hard thing to do, but it happened to JS engines because the money was there. Integrating the JVM with proper sandboxing would have required less money/energy.