He has some interesting ideas and analogies, but it's not clear that Joel actually understands AJAX/JS. The browser incompatibility problems are largely overblown, and the most annoying limitations are imposed by the browser (meaning that no JS library is going to fix them). He also doesn't seem to realize that all of the Google JS running in his browser IS generated by a compiler (from JS in most cases, from Java in a few others).

I noticed that on reddit the voting on my essays always had a higher proportion of downvotes after 10 minutes than 10 hours. I know there are reflexive upvoters as well as reflexive downvoters, but from the way the ratio changed over time it seemed that a higher percentage of downvoters were reflexive than upvoters. If so then the downarrow injects more stupidity into the system than the uparrow.

Shorter version: downvotes are more likely to be thoughtless.

"...but too old to have a grasp on technical details..."

Huh? Am I the only one the notice how illogical this is?

We are not basketball players. Some of us do are best hacking in our 40's and 50's. (Lay off the drugs - you'll see.)

Joel has forgotten more than many here have ever known about hacking. His only problem with this essay is that he has the balls to make a prediction.

There is only one prediction that is always 100% accurate - that no prediction will ever be 100% accurate.

Great read, Joel. Now back to my ramen.

A couple of problems with his argument:

1) Web entrepreneurs working now still need to optimize for speed. It's not like the desktop world where you are launching a year or two from now and can wait for the computers to catch up. You are launching a month from now and it needs to be fast. I would prefer to use a web mail client other than GMail, simply because I'm scared of my Google dependency. But every other web email client I've used ( Yahoo, Joyent, inbox.com, Zimbra) feels much slower. Google spends enormous effort optimizing their javascript load times and it really pays off.

2) Broadband speeds are not growing at Moore's law. Terrible regulatory law trumps technological gains.

3) It be hard for a company to lock everyone into its javascript platform when the entire source code is downloadable.

4) The trouble with javascript is not cross browser incompatibility. If you use a good library and have learned common gotchas you should not have to spend too much time debugging IE ( I probably spend less than 10% of my javascript coding time on cross browser issues). The trouble with javascript is that there are still a number of things it just can't do, and won't be able to do until the browsers change. For instance, there is no way to detect the exact pixel size of a character of text. This makes it impossible to build a real word processor in javascript. Nor can you detect a collision between the opaque regions of two png images (this is needed for most simple 2-d games). Well ... it's almost impossible to do these things. I suppose you could define your own image and font formats completely in javascript, and render the entire screen using 1 pixel divs. But that's just crazy talk. It would be a huge library - maybe 250 MB - and would be very slow until computers got faster. And it would require eating at least 6000 packages of ramen to build the thing. Hmmmmm .... maybe I have an idea I can apply to YCombinator with ... :-)

Joel is unimpressive, technically.

His software products are lightweights, and he makes most of his money from his fan base, selling books and job ads on his web site.

He's just not relevant any more (if he ever was in the first place).

1) Musashi's Book of Five Rings 2) Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People 3) Machaivelli's The Prince 4) Sun-Tzu's The Art of War 5) Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action 6) Steven Johnson's Emergence 7) Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel 8) Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything 9) Mark Buchanan's Nexus 10) C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain

Taken together, these books cover just about everything there is to know about the sciences, about human history, human nature and how to understand and communicate effectively with other people. Only one other book besides these needs to be studied/read: The Bible.

All made possible by 6000 packages of ramen noodles provided by pg:

"And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things."

Agreed. Joel is growing old :-) He is young enough to keep up with major valley developments (Twitter and YComb) but too old to have a grasp on technical details (Java-to-JS-compilers, for instance).

Another thing he is wrong about is "moore law of bandwidth": it does not exist. While CPUs are getting faster and RAM is growing like crazy, bandwidth is not growing. In fact I am starting to notice an annoying trend of businesses running on slower and slower connections.

But his thoughts on parallels between terminal/HTML transition to Windows/FancySDK are cool nevertheless. He may not be right about everything, but something similar to what he's talking about sure will happen.

Steve Yeggie blogged about inevitable "Rails for the Client" some time ago. Similar idea but expressed in more technical terms.

Article title makes it looks promising but actual content fails to deliver.

Better to read 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences': http://euler.slu.edu/~srivastava/wigner.pdf

Here is why we need a down arrow.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It is arguably the most useful book I've ever read, albeit with the most embarassing title.

As inklesspen mentioned, Elements of Style is a must.

Code Complete and the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Timeless coding wisdom.

For a laugh, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, or Hitchhiker's Guide.

Body Language, Julius Fast. Kitschy but fascinating insights into body language.

Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene. Brian is a fluke of nature--a physicist who can explain things realy well!

Anything by Phillip K. Dick. Sci-fi stories that make you think.

The best reason is because downvotes piss people off. They have been the cause of more flamewars on reddit than anything else. When you know you are right but everyone is downvoting you and upvoting the "wrong" guy, I know very few people who won't react aggressively.

No, GWT has nothing to do with Gmail or the JS compiler. GWT was actually a startup that Google acquired a few years ago and made open source. I think it was probably released before any Google project made significant use of it.

Personally, I prefer JS. My current project is mainly written in JS (using Rhino on the server).

Joel is light on the technical details. He's old enough to remember when C was going to be the language for everything. But not guru enough to mention or properly analyze anything else from that time. (Eiffel, Forth) Joel is just one of the mainstream programmer sheeple, just louder and with a bit of panache.

Dvorak has enough balls to make a prediction. Does that make him clever?