I feel like we are at an interesting place here with the WORA dream that everyone has been collectively chasing for a long time now. It was obviously the main

I feel like we are at an interesting place here with the WORA dream that everyone has been collectively chasing for a long time now. It was obviously the main selling point for Java for a long time but it never really had a good story for the front end although I know Google for example had a number of frameworks that did exactly this (GWT / Closure). Fundamentally the only thing that ran inside the browser was JavaScript which was a shame because that meant that for everyone who wanted to use a single language was forced to use it everywhere else which gave rise to things like Node, React Native and Electron etc. The best solution we had between those two options was to make an attempt to transpile other languages like Dart and TypeScript into JavaScript in order to overcome its shortcomings. While the reality of this is still a long way off I think the idea of WASM / WASI as a new platform that “all” languages could theoretically target is one of the more exciting prospects coming down the pipeline in terms of the WORA dream. I think it’s fair to say that it also has the potential to move the needle in a significant way for the “browser as an app platform” story. The question then becomes where does that leave us with JavaScript when you take away it’s main advantage. On the backend as well there are a lot of interesting things happening. Containers have gone from requiring a lot of complexity (kubernetes) to dead simple (knative / Google cloud run) where you just ship a container and everything works out of the box. Combined with things like gRPC on the backend and also coming to the browser I feel like the future of application development is looking genuinely exciting.