I don't think reinventing is quite right, reimplementing more like it.
Remember the thing that Microsoft was afraid of for the Web? A middle layer that makes your OS mostly irrelevant.
It took a roundabout way but we're getting there. Extremely high performance virtual machines that are all fairly compatible, are deployed across a vast range of operating systems and devices today.
Together with an UI toolkit that renders fairly similarly across all these devices.
Technically this maybe can't do things that a single computer couldn't do ages ago, but now every computer can run that code. And via LLVM you can compile almost anything to js.
And with a much better security model than "download random exe and run" as well.
The sneering merely shows that you haven't really thought about what is going on here.
The VMs aren't even close to "high performance" (although they are very wonderfully compatible), and the UI toolkit is not one (it's a document markup toolkit with buttons and such glued on, it's pretty awful compared to Mac OS's Interface Builder).
And any computer can run just about any kind of code now. Ask someone to download Python or LuaJIT and they can run your code.
Security models? In Lua, you can empty the environment and start fresh. You have a perfect sandbox with the flip of a switch.
I don't think the grandparent comment is sneering. I think he has an opinion that disagrees with yours.
Remember the thing that Microsoft was afraid of for the Web? A middle layer that makes your OS mostly irrelevant.
It took a roundabout way but we're getting there. Extremely high performance virtual machines that are all fairly compatible, are deployed across a vast range of operating systems and devices today.
Together with an UI toolkit that renders fairly similarly across all these devices.
Technically this maybe can't do things that a single computer couldn't do ages ago, but now every computer can run that code. And via LLVM you can compile almost anything to js.
And with a much better security model than "download random exe and run" as well.
The sneering merely shows that you haven't really thought about what is going on here.