This post just seems fundamentally misguided. The author's point that "there's lots of things that are difficult in the world, but, that doesn't mean no one is

This post just seems fundamentally misguided. The author's point that "there's lots of things that are difficult in the world, but, that doesn't mean no one is attempting them" seems to be his strongest defense for a native app. Other than that, we have the claim that " hacking a solution for the web that would work much better on the desktop is definitely not something you want to do." First of all, Light Table is a desktop app. Yes, the view layer will run in a web browser. But the runtime exists on your desktop. It is not a cloud editor like Cloud9, and will be running compiled byte code on your desktop in order to deliver that experience. In many respects, it is a native app (well, as native as a jvm runtime can be). Second of all, I think that Light Table is definitely hitting the mark of attempting something ambitious and difficult. When you attempt ambitious, difficult things you want to lower as many barriers to entry as possible. It's a matter of exercising proper judgement and determining what you're striving to achieve. For the author of Light Table, that means writing a lot of javascript and lisp. For someone else, it might mean writing a lot of Objective C. But, for God's sake, don't say that you should write a desktop app as a native app simply because you feel like there needs to be more "native code" in the world, especially in a day and age when your javascript compiles down to said native code.