> In 1990, Marc Porat convinced then-Apple-CEO John Sculley that the future of computing lay not in desktop personal computers, but much smaller portable devices combining computing power, communications systems, and data located on network-accessible servers.
Here's something few people know: Sun saw Telescript as a threat (because Sun was all about "the network is the computer" and now Telescript was invading this space) and started the Java project in response. Microsoft saw General Magic's social interface and deemed it to be a threat to Windows. Their response was "Microsoft Bob".
Mobile code was dying before, but the final nail in the coffin is the Spectre/Meltdown class of vulnerabilities (with new variants coming out monthly).
It seems modern microprocessors simply aren't designed to run untrusted code.
Mobile code was dying before, but the final nail in the coffin is the Spectre/Meltdown class of vulnerabilities (with new variants coming out monthly).
Is it though? I mean, has anybody stopped using Javascript as a result of Meltdown/Spectre?
True, Java applets largely died off, but that was as much because it took Sun WAY too long to ship the "Consumer JRE", coupled with a rash of Java security issues over a certain window of time, that made people scared to enable Java in their browsers. I doubt many more people disabled Java after Spectre/Meltdown, than before.
It would be much better if you could turn that word "garbage" into a sentence, or better a paragraph, so readers could learn something. I'm sure people would be interested to hear your experiences.
I loved this language. I still have all the papers somewhere. Unfortunately, the announcement of Java killed the few remaining chances it had of outliving General Magic.
Well that was staggeringly prescient.