I tend to start twitching a little whenever our neighborhood geek starts talking long and loudly about his "plausible deniability."

The denial is there, in spades. I'll give him that.

The plausible, not so much.

"An HTML-only web is great for relatively static content, but not so great for anything much beyond that. "

This sounds like nonsense to me, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and ask you for *concrete* examples of what you are talking about. I have yet to be cited a single good example here - very often what is being done would work just fine in HTML, with less overhead, but the 'designers' just do not understand HTML, or have any desire to learn it, so they do things this way instead.

Certainly javascript can produce a slicker appearance and make certain things a bit smoother - but to do so it sacrifices device-independence and browser agnosticism - critical advantages that underlie the success of the web and whose loss can only undermine it.

Now if you build a proper web page, and then *enhance* it with javascript sanely, preserving graceful fallbacks, that would be fine. You can have your slick interface without sacrificing the web. And I can choose to avoid your slick interface so as not to sacrifice my security.

The 'designers' that cant be bothered to do that, and the suits that keep them employed, are the reason we cant have nice things. In this case, javascript.

"Is it so difficult to grok why you might want content to change on the client?"

Not difficult to understand why it was desired.

The point is it's harmful and been proven harmful, and far too harmful for the small advantages it brings to outweigh that.

You make the fatal flaw of assuming that ethics and prudence are the result of higher cognitive ability. Have you considered the possibility that they understand exactly what they are doing and just don't care?

" This next-generation of politician could one day come to understand the moral and sociopolitical repercussions of things like intentionally shutting down the government."

You mean like having successfully pandered to your constitutes so that you'll be re-elected and can continue to profit from selling out to corporate interests, enjoy the social status of being a congressman, and blowjobs from interns?

Hell most of the the strongest opponents of issues like climate change and homosexual marriage ARE homosexuals. When THEY get busted getting a blowjob it's generally from a male intern or other staffer.

"Implantable memory even if VERY expensive would be very useful. Why go to college when you can pay $40k
and have a college degree without also having to give up 4 years of earning potential to get it."

I think you seriously underestimate what "VERY expensive" means. That is what such a technology might cost when at the dirt cheap and commonplace level. Anytime in the first 20 years I doubt you'd see a BLANK implant that wasn't priced in the millions.

It will happen that way first. They'll do implantable blank memory, then they'll have ridiculously overpriced modules that are able to communicate wirelessly so that you can copy and record. Then...

Why don't we just skip the bullshit and put something with both mesh and infrastructure wireless technology in so that it automatically links both to other modules and to a tunneled network in the internet automatically integrating everyones brains into a massive network of shared memory and artificial memory. We can have datacenters where massive external forms of this are connected to the network as well.

Or hey, why not let go of the conscious reigns, put the implantable chip that interacts with brain electrical and chemical signals both capable of generating detectable responses and receiving them. Still put the mesh and infrastructure wireless technology in, still build the tunneled network, but just put enough designed elements in place to facilitate the massively parallel communication high way and let the brains figure out their own higher level protocols.

Worried about security? Don't be that worried. You are neurally linked to everyone you see with an optical connection already. This just steps it up to having a slower link to lots of people all the time.

Yeah, I'm a bit confused because I thought this had become common practice. For a few years now, I've seen a bunch of games where you get some special content (a different outfit, or starting the game with some bonus or special gear) when you pre-order from a specific store. Since it's different "special content" for different stores, you'd have to buy multiple copies of the game to get all of the content. Then, after some period of time, the game releases all of the special gear as "DLC", and then it's also is included in the GoTY edition (or whatever they feel like calling the edition that includes all the updates and DLC).

Is there a difference between that and what we're talking about? I'm not sure I really see the problem. These bit of "special content" are usually kind of stupid, like maybe you start with a extra bit of body armor and some shotgun shells or something.

Plus, honestly, I usually wait until the "extra special edition" is on sale on Steam before I buy games these days. Not that I would expect everyone to wait, but it's kind of great. I avoid the hype machine and get to see what people think after the hype has died down, you get all the DLC, additional content, and bug fixes all at once, and you get it for 40% off or something.

I'm not saying that you can't drop backwards compatibility. It just seems like Microsoft sometimes screws up compatibility with older versions of their software to force you onto the upgrade treadmill, which is what was originally being discussed.

Programming is not something that requires grueling training or rare talents. Algebraic topology, cardiothoracic surgery, and competitive chess require those. If you're writing code that requires elite skills, you're doing it wrong - no one is going to be able to understand it, and you will never be able to troubleshoot it. Someone with an IQ of 100 can become a perfectly competent Java or C++ programmer with two years of intensive training.

You said "competitive chess" which implies a high skill level and "cardiothoracic surgery" which implies doing it well enough to have zero fatal errors most of the time. Those don't correlate to "competent programmer", nor to a programmer who can perform well in a job that requires code that works, has a long service life, and can be maintained. Writing a PGP key manager that can traverse the web of trust without granting privs to an attacker, for example, really does require elite skills -- just like your elite electrician and elite body mechanic.

Anyone can write Hello World, many can write an address book. It takes a lot of study to be able to write a cluster management system.

First off, love your post. Well said.

The tools, well I know people who swear vim is easier to use than the latest IDE that has full intellisense and refactoring builtin, and they are probably right - in that they have learned their craft using that tool and actually are more productive than the bloated and slow IDE could make them.

I would add that very little of my programming time is spent writing code, which is what an IDE is most helpful with; refactoring, code skeletons, reminding you of the order of args, etc. Most of the time I spend programming -- at least on anything that I expect will have a long service life -- is spent thinking through the right way for the code to work so it will be clear, fast, easy on memory, and work in a way that makes sense when we apply it in a different context. There is no IDE or language that can help with that part of the problem.

"If you want the web to be useful, you should be pushing for only the most minimal use of Javascript."

When this crap first started getting pushed, a lot of us saw the potential problems coming and objected. We were assured it was only to be used to 'spice up' webpages, not to replace them.

Such assurances are obviously shit. If it's allowed to use it, then the lowest common denominator of self-proclaimed 'designers' can, will, and must overuse it. This overuse expands steadily and predictably until and unless there is effective pushback. Today we have reached the point where the typical corporate 'website' (and I use scare quotes because these things are NOT websites, at all) consists of hundreds of executable files, fetched from dozens of different servers, all of which the browser is expected to suck in and execute without so much as giving you a warning.

And contrary to the hilarious suggestion I see at the top of many many webpages today ("Enable Javascript for a better user experience") this does not bring with it any substantial improvements for the user. Quite the contrary, it results in a worse immediate experience (no, I didnt want a dozen popups, autoplaying video presentations, and a huge advertisement that floats over the text so I cannot see it!) and also in the longer term (like a week later when you discover that some random ad server sent your browser a rootkit and it happily executed it, oops!.)

But the point is history has proven this is a bad code drives out good situation. If it's allowed, it will take over, just like a weed.

Turn off javascript. See the web as it really is. And support the web that still exists, before it's too late.

"English translation: as usual, Flash is useless except as a vector for malware, viruses, trojans and keyloggers. Remove Flash from your system."

That's actually not quite true. Flash is a great way to develop simple games quickly and cheaply.

The problem isnt Flash itself (which is on the whole a fine product, used correctly) but the idea of using Flash as a substitute for a webpage, the installation of it as a browser plugin, and the auto-execution of it by the browser. None of that should be tolerated.

It's still possible to get a standalone flash interpreter and only feed it local, vetted files, which is really fine (or as close to fine as lots of other things you do every day, at least.)  But Adobe seems to be trying their best to discourage that and force everyone to use it as an auto-enabled browser component instead. The one way to use the program that causes major problems is also the one way they want you to use it.

Everyone who has been infected as a result of this should really get together and sue these arseholes, because money is the only language they understand.

Excellent advice.

Expect to be flamed into oblivion by all the 'web devs' that cant be bothered to learn how HTML works and rely on this crap instead, though.

The web - the real web, the HTML web, appears to be shrinking at the moment. New content is often hidden behind some kind of opaque app crap for no apparent reason and with no actual webpage for fallback (thanks google!) and old content occasionally gets removed as well. Each time this happens, it makes it even harder and less likely to revive the healthy web we once built with such love and care.

And naturally the people that are making a profit on this crap will just keep right on cranking it out as long as that is true.

The real victims here are future generations, who should inherit that world-wide web, but are set to inherit something entirely different - and inferior in every way (when judged from the users perspective - from the perspective of big Advertising of course the story will be different, but we built this web for humans, not for marketing.)

That's rubbish. Most of the major platforms have had Java ported to them. Including various obscure systems is ludicrous. If I want a program that I'm almost guaranteed will run without recompile on Linux, Windows, BSD and even many mainframes, then Java remains the best solution. I'm not saying, from a programming perspective, that it's all that great, but from a platform neutral perspective for most of the systems that a programmer will encounter, it remains the best.

Have fun running an x86-64 Linux binary natively on a Windows 8 machine. I can. however, write a Java program that I can almost guarantee will in fact run on x64 Linux or Windows.

Oh, right, I thought that JavaScript sucked because I was under the impression that it was dynamically typed, allowed monkey-patching, had a lame set of numeric types, poor support for sequential I/O, etc., etc., etc. Oh, wait... those things are true? But Douglas Crockford says it's Lisp-y, so that gives us license to sweep all those problems under the rug.

I don't remember what I had in mind when writing that, but the first thing that comes to mind is Microsoft Office formats. There were a few years where they would release a new version of Office with incompatible versions of their Office file formats, which meant that if one person in the company upgraded, every file they touched suddenly became unreadable in older versions. That was a few years ago, but they've gotten so much flack for it that they've stabilized the formats after Office 2007.

IIRC they did similar shenanigans at some point with WMA/WMV files, where they released a new version of Windows Media Player that automatically used the new version of their codec, which was unsupported on older versions of Windows Media Player. That would be fine, since Windows Media Player was free, except that they didn't allow you to install the new version of Windows Media Player on older versions of Windows. They've done similar things with DirectX and IE.