Having things "just work" can be really appealing. I once had an issue where my Linux distro of choice was having a tough time with my monitor orientation. I got quite a few linux gurus involved and none could figure it out. I'm sure it eventually would have worked, but that's not an experience I'm particularly fond of.
And then software that does exist will often have bugs for Linux that are overlooked due to how small the market is.
Whenever I'm onboarded onto new codebases, I have a tough time finding my own debug logs when there are hundreds of logs from different systems all cluttering the terminal. It's hard to know where one log ends and another begins. It's just white text on a black background.
I started this a couple days ago, but it's already been useful for my work. After building it, I found out projects like this had already existed. There's a section on bottom of the readme comparing them.
I'm pretty sure he knows what Doordash is. I assume the thing that doesn't exist is ordering via a phone line, not an internet-based interface.
i.e. texting or calling a number in a specific way based on some standard tons of fast food places provide to make fast food orders without human interaction.
It still seems pretty disingenuous to say it doesn't exist even today just because we do the same thing with better tech today - very likely what their hypothetical company would've ended up doing, same as Netflix or Twitter embracing the technology for their use cases and moving away from DVDs and SMS.
I really think he's trying to pussyfoot around his poorly-aged claim by changing the goalpost. Even in 2005, with Domino's order tracker, it was still a purposely-contrarian stance on what technology would allow us to do with food ordering in the near future. If this is considered a hill to die on, that's embarrassing.
My previous understanding was that service would be stopped once you hit past the free tier.
Upon review, it does not look like this is the case. I have several very low traffic projects on which would have never been anywhere close to the free limit. However, if I get involved in a random spam attack, it seems I could be on the hook for several thousand dollars.
This is incredibly dangerous. Netlify is often used as a beginner friendly free tier for static hosting. Not as something that is cheap, but as something that is free. This is just an overall dangerous position to put people in.
It does say it's pay-as-you-go on their pricing page. However they probably should have a giant warning page for new users who don't know that this is how this kind of service works if they want to target the beginner web-dev market. As far as I know, no other similar service has this though.
I sunk a decent amount of time into WebAssembly over the past few months (I am the author of "watlings").
From my understanding, there are 3 answers here.
1. Most spaces do not need WASM. You don't necessarily see speed improvements since usually your JS and WASM (in the browser) are compiled into the same thing.
2. WASM is very good at bringing tools to new spaces. The biggest limitation here is in both tooling and education. It is not trivial to compile something like FFMPEG for the browser. Improvements to the WASI standard are helping here.
3. WASM is starting to see use in different spaces. For example, as a containerization format for efficient sandboxing.
> 2. WASM is very good at bringing tools to new spaces.
Yeah, I agree with this. I have a few ongoing fresh-start projects that are being built with WASM as the primary build target. And like you said, the tooling is definitely not great. Plus the load times for some wasm binaries are pretty slow.
I really like Exercism! Unfortunately their exercise model is considerably more free-form where it teaches you considerably less and in much larger chunks. I think this is a great model for certain contexts, but the format I have in the repo is more similar to "rustlings" and "ziglings" where you're taught syntax and features alongside the code examples.
I don't know that their Wasm module is necessarily "broken", so I'm unsure whether my contributions would be welcome.
Very fair! It's been close to a decade since I used Exercism so I don't really know what their stuff is like nowadays. From what I remember, the focus was less on teaching you the language directly (via instructions) and was more on encouraging the user to reiterate on their code and experiment, and letting reviewers lead the direction of growth.
My initial motivation to learn WASM (as someone from a primarily web background) was that I had a pretty poor understanding of WASM in general and so I had a lot of difficulty working with WASM builds in just about any capacity other than a heavy JS wrapper.
There are aspects to how WASM works that are quite different from other kinds of assembly formats that make learning the basics pretty important. e.g. how memory is requested, provided, grown. How functions are received and exported. Capabilities of tables.
A lot of this might be abstracted by massive wrappers, but you're losing a lot in perf and debugability when using them.
And then software that does exist will often have bugs for Linux that are overlooked due to how small the market is.