That's like saying that the Watt steam engine [1] was basically Newcomen's atmospheric engine [2], not to mention the Aeolipile [3] from ancient Greece. Yeah,

That's like saying that the Watt steam engine [1] was basically Newcomen's atmospheric engine [2], not to mention the Aeolipile [3] from ancient Greece. Yeah, if you squint hard enough, everything new is just the reinvention of the wheel [4]. And yet – sometimes small, incremental improvements are what it takes to push a concept (steam powered machines, or bytecode for execution in the browser) from niche applications to being a breakthrough technology. I don't know if WebAssembly will be that incremental improvement, but claiming that it won't because Java tried and failed is a lazy, fallacious argument. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [4] Speaking of reinventing the wheel: Those radial tires, eh, who needs them? They're basically just like cross ply tires. Not to mention the spoked wooden wheels that have been around since forever.