The video creator is on HN so if the gods of internet attention shine upon us he may be able to comment here. In lieu of that, I'll offer my one-line take of t

The video creator is on HN so if the gods of internet attention shine upon us he may be able to comment here. In lieu of that, I'll offer my one-line take of the prediction of the video. JavaScript will fade from popularity, but its (original) popularity will inspire a low-level assembly-like language (looking more and more like WebAssembly these days) that will provide a new substrate for most application development, web-based or otherwise, replacing traditional binaries. As you point out it's not at all clear, even five years on from this talk, that this prediction will be correct. WebAssembly is currently complementary to JS and cannot fully replace it. The vast majority of websites these days use JS but not WebAssembly. Use of WebAssembly for applications that traditionally have not been run inside a web browser (e.g. GIMP, LibreOffice, etc.) is still nascent and it's nowhere near a sure bet that it'll take off there. But maybe, just maybe, it'll happen.