WebAssembly

The browser keeps evolving to become a more comprehensive platform, operating system. WebAssembly is a new proposed standard bytecode that the major browser-makers are committing to support. It will interop with javascript (I believe) and HTML5 APIs, and is intended as a compile-target for other languages. More information here.

Why Don't Browsers Let Web-Apps Write To The Local File System?

My Quora question : I mean, I know why. It’s a security thing. But why couldn’t a browser have an API for scripts to read / write the file system and a security feature where the web-app has to ask and be given permission by the user before it runs? (Just as Android apps. have …

Elm Lang

I must confess, I’m very intrigued by Elm-Lang. For me there are four virtues : 1) FRP. All the attempts I’ve seen to graft FRP onto existing languages have looked clunky to me – ahem … Trellis? – Requiring the explicit definition of special types of fields. This is the kind of thing that I think needs …

LightTable

Interesting this new surge of dynamic IDEs. First there was Brett Victor’s awesome demo. Now there’s LightTable (promoted on KickStarter, discussed on Quora) Sporadic thoughts. Is this implemented in the browser? (Bespin? CodeMirror)? Perhaps we’re seeing this explosion of innovation as IDE authors move to the cloud. A Kickstarter project? That’s cool. But motivated by …