can you go back to source code from WebAssembly binary? I dont want a web that serves me obfuscated binary blobs.
What's wrong with that argument is the fact that although most users don't need it, it's an excellent way for those interested to explore into and find out how things work, and essentially get into web development with nearly no effort. If this trend continues, in the future when browsers become nothing more than dumbed-down interactive TVs, I think there will be very few, if any, web developers who started out of their own interest and exploration instead of solely thinking of it as a profession, and that's a really bad thing. (For the corporations who want to take control, this could be viewed as a good thing - why would they want to encourage independent thought and exploration when they could have dogmatic obedience?)
Computing systems are becoming more closed and proprietary, and this will be a big step backwards in terms of openness of the Web that lead to its growth and freedom in the first place.
If that were the case, why do people get interested in programming in any non-interpreted language without thinking about it as a profession? I have trouble seeing this as a big step backwards in this regard since there are plenty of non-interpreted languages that kids in high school have gotten interested in themselves, even when there wasn't nearly as many good resources for learning them online.
I also don't see a huge difference between Web Assembly and minified javascript. Sure, with the later you could in theory piece through it without a disassembler, but if that is your introduction into the language I doubt you'll learn much at all (or want to). The gap grows even smaller when you take into the account the fact that Web Assembly is desired to replace asm.js, which was already incredibly obfuscated.
> Computing systems are becoming more closed and proprietary, and this will be a big step backwards in terms of openness of the Web that lead to its growth and freedom in the first place.
Web assembly was developed publicly from pretty much the very beginning on GitHub. We live in a world where the biggest closed-source players have open sourced implementations of their programming languages/platforms, compilers and all (e.g. OpenJDK, .NET Core, Roslyn, Swift). There are no popular languages around now where the leading implementations aren't open source. If this is what "becoming more closed and proprietary" looks like, then I can't say I'm opposed.
Thankfully for the openness of the Web, developer tools have been a source of intense competition among browsers. I see no reason why this will not continue to be true for introspection of Web Assembly.
We had to buy magazines and books to view any source.
Still lots of us got interested and a few guys managed to build the initial web infrastructure without a view source button.
I also doubt you are old enough to have used something like the Altair 8800 or have built your own computer from Elektor schematics.
I wonder if it hadn't been easier if we'd just gone with sandboxed, auto-updated native applications rather than taking a 15-year detour through html, dhtml, 'ajax' web 2.0, spi w/ 'compiled js' and now this...