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Comment by mtkd | Hacker News Reader

You can't ignore context. Fortran is a very strong language for a specific application - you can't compare it to Javascript.

Delphi was a framework using Pascal. It was a revolution at the time - and you can see it's influence in many software tools available today.

You could argue that the current SQL/Rails API/JSON/Backbone/JQuery/CoffeeScript/HTML/CSS abomination we've created could be improved or replaced with something as disruptive as Delphi was at the time.

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I wish there was some way to vote for that abomination in the poll. Personally, writing Java/Html hybrid templates that are served as html documents and then further manipulated by dynamically altering the DOM in javascript on the client is the stupidest programming style I can imagine.

Out of curiosity, what is your favored alternative for web applications? Server-side rendering of complete pages? Client-side manipulation of pure HTML?

I don't know of a good alternative. Thus my grumpiness.

A redesigned transport model other than HTTP? Continuations? A saner front-end language that can also be used at the server side and it's not the Node.js failfest?

That's a good point. How come we are still using http? I mean, the closest we've come AFAIK to something almost useful is ajax, but that's still not very good considering it's javascript... Maybe I'm unaware of some secret google development.

There's Google's SPDY, but it doesn't fix all that we might like from HTTP, mostly performance stuff.

I guess, it's the agreeing on something and then adopting it and then having it catch the market part that's making this difficult.

On another field that I follow, we haven't had anything better replace MIDI for like 30 years...

Is MIDI bad? I mean, why do you think it should be replaced? I am not familiar with this area but I am honestly interested!

MIDI is very slow and has a very limited message set. There are better alternatives, like OSC, but it seems like the chances of the music industry collectively acting in its own best interest again and approving a new standard are very slim.

Well, the biggest limitation is that it has granularity of 0 to 256 for message data.

That means if you want an analog like continuous change from 0 to max for some audio property, you get stepping instead.

It's also not very fast for todays work with tons of channels.

I doesn't know about audio at all, etc.

OSC is a better replacement, but not widespread enough.

You can replace HTTP with anything you want using WebSockets, but I never got what's wrong with it.

Given that websockets don't even work reliably yet, and are not even implemented in all popular browsers of the day, that's hardly a proposition. Not to mention that everybody implementing his own HTTP replacement from scratch with websockets instead of a common standard is a highway to hell.

As for what's wrong with it:

- better support for non-blocking requests - better support for streaming media - better support for caching - better content negotiation (e.g for "retina" x2 assets) - better authentication mechanisms - better support for encryption

Also check: http://static.usenix.org/event/usenix99/invited_talks/mogul....

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