> Theoretically, I don't think you can do anything in WebAssembly that's not possible to do with Javascript.

Theoretically you can, by asking JavaScript to do it for you.

Practically, you can do a lot less. At least in the browser. WASI is a whole 'nother can of worms.

Whereas Perl is somehow performant?

At it's best it's negligibly faster, at it's worst it's negligibly slower. They are in the same ballpark, playing the same game, the only thing is that Python makes playing the game more fun and better experience. If you ever need that raw data crunching performance Python today has much better ecosystem of wrapped C libraries, Cython, PyPy etc. Maybe CPAN is huge but most people won't bother as everything around it is kinda arcane. And then we come to the point that, as extension of all this, many more people are adding performance tweaks to NumPy than to Math::Pari or Math::GSL.

I mean, numbers (GitHub repos, developer users, hell even benchmarks) speak for itself so you can pretend it's not happening but it is.

I think the whole thing boils down to utility.

Perl has, well, to say gently, less than easily manageable syntax, that was still saner than Awk and Sed. So when it became ubiquitous on most systems many complex scripting has migrated from sh/bash+awk+sed to a much saner, more developer-friendly Perl interpreter, which then started to be used for scripting webpages as that was (at the time) the next big thing.

Then came PHP and most new users never learned Perl to work solely with websites (and most never really got down-dirty to *nixen either as WAMP thingies enabled all that jazz on Windows).

Then Python became ubiquitous on most systems, and because it provides an even nicer and cleaner development experience people generally started using Python for everything they used Perl for, then more and more often for things they used PHP for, and then Data Science thing came and Python ecosystem was very quick and efficient in embracing it so it started to become the dominating language of choice for quick-fixes and one-offs and as extension inevitably for more and more large, business-critical software development, as tt's often the case thus becoming an underdog competitor to Java much like PHP was/is.

Now there are tastes and tastes but there is still some, if not generality, then at least majority or dominance. Sure, some people really love VB, but most don't. Sure, some people really hate Python but most don't.

Lua

Just did. Copy the folder (including the node_modules tree). Run `node .` (the dot is not a typo). Done

Oh deary me. In fact for $1000 XPS13 gets you a 5200U scoring 3800 at cpumark, and at $1300 Mac gets you twice as big SSD and a 5257U scoring 4250. You can probably invest those 300 in lots more than more SSD with Dell. And you get a leaner machine. Also, Windows and Ubuntu will fly on the Dell. OSX is a horrible hog (that's why Macbooks always have beefy processors, even though most of their users only use them for facebook, iworks and email), and everyone using Windows or LInux on them will testify that they simply fly, whereas people running Hackintoshes on mid-spec notebooks aren't having nearly as much fun despite their machines being very performant with WIndows, even with all that bloatware users typically get, and especially Linux.

PyPy.. Obviously not as fast as HotSpot or V8 but in the league at leas. OTOH using it still means you have to give up on many binary extensions due to JIT nature of PyPy which requires different bindings.

And you weren't even a customer!

I'm no fan of Java, but I'd really like to hear about where C# is worlds ahead of Java now. We've had "evangelist gone sales rep" from local Microsoft in our Java/OracleDB shop recently. I was somehow in-between .Net open sourcing and first Mono based on .Net Core release, so we were honestly interested, esp. since purchasing VS licences was an option, compared to running everything on WinServer, which simply wasn't.

What was shown to us was visibly catching up, but still behind modern MVC frameworks, support for version control systems was also quite behind (I can assume TeamServe or what's it called must look like sci-fi to people who never used modern project management and CI software, but it's not) what is currently available in all FLOSS dev ecosystems, including Java (which, granted, is the most conservative one). Both are behind the curve compared to RoR, Python and node.js, and MVC6 is trying hard to be there where modern Node frameworks are (MS is very openly interested in node)... All in all, we weren't impressed very much.

I can see few more plausible reasons for the decline:

1) Servers are increasingly Linux, even in enterprise. Microsoft response by open-sourcing .Net might be too little, loo late.
2) Client apps are increasingly mobile, Microsoft's market-share here is dismal.

1) and 2) have given boost to Java, boost to Java is instantly C# decline since both languages rely on same approach to project management (the "nobody ever got fired for...." style) to thrive.

3) Visual Studio my be the bees knees, but .Net is far, far behind the curve when it comes to web application development, which brings us to:
4) Start-up economy is on fire, and there it's a run for least verbose, fastest to market type of development (release early, release often, pivot often, get tons of cash, then rewrite backend in something that can actually scale --- see: Twitter). Success in software-development related economy is not (and frankly, never was) about most solid technology choices from the get go, and more and more devterpreneurs are seeing this.

Re 3) and 4) I can't think of any major web app (apart from StackExchange, granted) that is based on a Microsoft stack.

There is no such thing as file type flag in OSX tho, it uses the NeXT concept of bundle directories (which NeXT actually borrowed from RiscOS). The extension that marks applications is .app and "app bundle" is quite common name for it. Pretty sure it's where the "app" shortening for "application" got it's ubiquitousness that then spread with popularity of iOS.

But I distinctively remember even back in the 90s that the term Application was the "proper" term for software installation - as Application can consist of multiple Programs, but not vice versa.

Well no, it is not. Productivity cannot be measured in GDP due to various (political, military, ownership/control of resources etc.) factors skewing international trade that it's derived from.

Anyway, Americans are obviously not top country vis-a-vis GDP. And that is after the fact that USA is the big-dog of international relations that doesn't shy from imposing control over someone else's resources using military aggression (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya to name a few), which is hardly true for places like Luxembourg or Norway.

I was not talking about state-owned telcos, only state-owned body that leases the core infrastructure and leases it to telcos on equal basis. Because telcos often own the core infrastructure, it gives those big (and often previously state-owned telcos) unfair advantage over smaller, also private telcos, in addition to other concerns stated above. When these are privatized or stock marketed former-state telcos it also means that someone (not the public) is getting the infrastructure that was funded from taxpayers money.

Much like there are no private owned roads, highways or railways, there should be no private owned backbones, and telcos should find a way of private/public parnership programmes if they want to incentivize technology-wise progress of the backbones, or utilize what is already there.

No, Aura/Ozone is the toolkit (Aura being the widget/chrome layer, and Ozone lower level graphic layer).

Except that TFA clearly states they are porting Ozone (their graphics toolkit, as they're not using Qt Gtk or anything else) to Wayland.

Common missunderstanding is that Wayland is a display server. It is not. It's a protocol that UI toolkits use to talk to the compositor (KWin, Weston etc.).

I'm pretty sure that Canonical, by now, are more or less certian they will need to provide for apps to talk Wayland to Mir as not everyone will be using one of the big UI toolkits that talk to Mir directly. To those apps, Mir will be just another compositor.

And I don't mean Google, Google is pragmatic enough and has manpower to port Ozone to Mir as well.