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His acknowledgement of the elephant in the room ("... shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS...") is prescient for 2011. Today it's even worse. How many versions of lipstick on pig are we to endure (Backbone, Angular, React, Vue..., Bootstrap, less, sass...) before someone actually makes a sane UI development toolkit?

Think of the children.

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The problem is the web was designed for documents not apps. And JS wasn’t designed for what it does now. The closest thing we had to a sane development toolkit was Adobe Flex. Someone came up with that and it was ok. But other more powerful forces particularly Apple made it disappear. Google is in charge now maybe it’s up to them.

But a lot of the web is in fact serving documents, and using complicated apps to do it.

It's not surprising, as the two categories do really merge into one another. A web store is certainly an app -- but it's also the modern equivalent of an store catalogue, which is a document.

> a sane UI development toolkit?

Elm-lang, IMO.

Elm is sane but IMO not ready and may not be for years. Breaking changes each version, plus a lot of boilerplate have moved me off Elm to preferring TS/React even though I love FP

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