> And even the largest selling point of the entire stack - develop once, run everywhere - is far less true then many like to admit. But it's more true than any

> And even the largest selling point of the entire stack - develop once, run everywhere - is far less true then many like to admit. But it's more true than any platform in the history of mankind. I've noticed a resounding chorus of seasoned developers railing against the web as application platform for over a decade now. But their complaints are always comparing an open standards based platform against some proprietary platform or GUI toolkit. Of course Microsoft or Apple are going to put together a more cohesive app SDK than the W3C. But neither of those behemoths has ever approached the ubiquity of the web, not by a long shot, because every single platform they target has to be developed by them. The web is available everywhere, and if a new corporate behemoth builds the next great platform, they must include web support because that is now considered baseline functionality. I'm surprised more old-school developers don't recognize what an amazing accomplishment this is. So yeah, JavaScript is terrible, but it's standing on the most ubiquitous platform ever created. And you can't build that platform by thinking to yourself, "what would the ultimate cross-platform application platform look like?" It doesn't work that way. The web won because of it's braindead simplicity, that was the thin edge of the wedge. You see being document-based as a weakness, but that's its strength, because documents have a higher utility-to-complexity ratio than apps. Even today when all us software elites are thinking about javascript-based apps, the web is still dominated by a massive substrate of documents, and many apps exist only to manipulate documents, so being document-based and allowing anyone to edit documents was the killer feature of the web. How many network application protocols/platforms/toolkits have been invented since the birth of the internet? Certainly a lot more than anyone will ever be aware of because they didn't have the means to gain traction. Systems on the scale of the web don't—can't—happen by design. Instead of complaining how terrible it is we need to look at what incremental improvements are possible. Over time this leads to real evolution, and yeah it's slower than we'd like, but there's no other way forward without chucking out all the users with the bathwater and becoming irrelevant.