Assembler programmers don’t have groupies
The most recent Joel on Software is yet another of his oft-linked to industry history/vision of the future bits that again fails to mention the coming Singularity. In it he likens current AJAX applications (using Google’s Gmail as a specific example) to Lotus 1..2..3.. and other DOS standouts doomed by the great leap forward that was Microsoft Windows.
Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.
But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.
[...]
And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.
So what I wonder is this: isn’t this exactly what the GWT is? A relatively feature-rich programming toolkit that compiles down to JavaScript (and eventually pre-compiled JavaScript or whatever, one would imagine), generates code for specific browsers, allows for all the whiz-bang features one could imagine, etc etc.? Is Joel’s only beef that it’s written in that king of the third rate languages Java? If the same thing happened in JavaScript (which is much nicer) would that be OK?
Personally I think Google and the rest of the current purveyors of AJAX are counting on Yegge’s NBL to power the Singularity. But that’s just me.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
I think Joel is really losing it now. It doesn’t matter that Javascript is slow, but being slow is what killed Java. Not only that, but Java can’t be any faster than 1/10th the speed of the underlying platform because it runs in a sandbox (of course, when run in a browser, Javascript also runs in a sandbox and actually manages to achieve the 1/10th speed goal ;-).
Furthermore, all things that run in a sandbox are doomed…. but not JavaScript/DOM based apps, because they are “native”…..
BTW, another sandbox model that will never work: processes/memory protection. :-)
This is even better than the Wasabi blog post (I actually achieved my 15 minutes of ‘net fame by writing a blog entry picking apart what he was saying) for being self-contradictory.
…and yeah, does he not grok what GWT is?
I also wonder if he groks that you don’t run Java Applets on phones. You run Java applications. Because they don’t have a sandbox they really can touch all the goodies.