> Day to day, people don't "suffer" with the Windows desktop.

Ever had the Windows Defender Antivirus transform a 30-second in-house processing into a 10-minute one?
Ever had to debug this crap for two weeks, not having any clue about the origin of the slowdown, while everybody at your company complains that the in-house processing is now taking ages?
Ever discovered, to your despair, that the Windows Defender Antivirus *cannot* be programmatically disabled, meaning that to get back to the original speed, you were going to have to write special multithreading code to workaround the 10ms lag before reading any new file?
Ever had your Windows Desktop decide to expose personal pictures as a screensaver?
Why should we have to deal with all this crap?

> if you think this would work with the vast majority of the population (us technical folk are a minority) - you have not got out enough and met normal people.
My experience with "normal people" (20 years old to 60 years old) switching from Windows to Ubuntu is that there's a 6-month period during which I have to do *some* tech support, and then they're mostly autonomous.
My experience with "normal people" is that their Windows installation become, as time passes, a shedload of crap ; I've been called to the rescue, many times, because people were thinking their computer was haunted. Most of the time, due to (multiple) malwares, but sometimes also due half-uninstalled products. When you first get your hands on their PC, there's a 5s lag between clicking on something, and getting a response from the OS, due to all the unwanted stuff they're running without knowing it.
So yes, I think these people are suffering.

People, keep safe from piracy : don't travel by boat.

Although parenting would certainly work, if it's an "easy answer", what's preventing us from applying it already?

What you say makes sense ; but then, the issue comes from the browser monoculture (which allows exploit scaling). Or from the precompiled plugin monoculture, which applies to Java and Flash, who were only distributed as precompiled binaries.

Exploits as well exist in almost any code that parses complex data coming from outside (loaders for PNG, JPG, HTML, WEBM...) ... why make a special case for WASM?

I think the comparison is unfair ; Javascript/asmjs/WASM can't address the host memory the way an ActiveX component could.
It's easy for an ActiveX component to crash almost any host, simply access a NULL pointer from your code. Doing this from a Javascript/asmjs/WASM program is several orders of magnitude harder, and generally needs to be specially tailored for one specific version of one specific browser.

Can Wine actually run 16-bit programs?

This is surprisingly easy to find crashes using dumb fuzzing (you can look at "radamsa"). To get more accurate results, you can use American Fuzzy Lop, which guides the fuzzing using live coverage information.

This would be the fastest road to get a GNU/Linux port.

Alexa, fire!

> Programming languages started getting more complex, harder to learn, and use starting with C++.
Just because a language is easy to learn doesn't make it easy to use.
If this were the case, we would all be programming in Brainfuck!
And it's a lot more easy to write a working program in Java than in C (hell, lots of Java programmers don't even know what a memory leak or a "link error" means)

> And OO design and programming has failed in each and every goal for which it was originally proposed.
Despite OO turning out not being the promised silver bullet (code reuse, natural design, ...), OO was a huge improvement and still is a huge success.
If you're not convinced: https://www.quora.com/Was-obje...

"7 minutes, 26 seconds, and the Fundamental Theorem of Agile Software Development" ( https://vimeo.com/79106557 )
JB Rainsberger explains how we usually do our estimates based on essential complexity, although the dev time is often being dominated by accidental complexity (at least, it's quickly watched :-))

Whose freedom? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee 100% freedom to each of them simultaneously. They are incompatible. For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So, it makes no sense simply to state that a license "reduces freedom in general". So, let's please stop saying imprecisely wrong things like "GPL code doesn't give me freedom because it puts restrictions on the way I can redistribute it". The GPL has always been about protecting the freedoms of the end-users at all cost, not the the vendors' freedoms.

Or Python?

It turns out codingstyle-related debates become mostly inexistent when people don't have to manually enforce the stylistic rules themselves.
So just hook uncrustify or astyle at the beginning of your build process, and commit the configuration file. Problem solved.

Please note that it doesn't have to work to be patented.