When I am being philosophical, smoking a cigar and sipping tequila after midnight, I begin to understand that the only software I've written that has a chance of outliving me is my open source. Everything else I've done has just been to serve up fleeting amusements. There is literally nothing commercially closed that I have contributed to that shouldn't be utterly scrapped.

If I died tonight, my positive impact on this planet for its people now and in the future is probably just constrained to my kids surviving me. Not an inconsequential thing, I love my kids like crazy and they're going on to do greater things than me. I just have the sense I've got more to offer than procreation and raising good people.

In my opinion, any hairy audacious moonshot goals humanity chooses to tackle should be open sourced in every way possible - otherwise the efforts cannot be fully genuine and transparent to generations that follow. Perhaps the increased open-sourcing of code and designs we see from industry today versus 20 years ago is the best we can hope for in competitive capitalist societies; maybe what we have is good and is the most we can expect.

> The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper.

Absolutely!

> The open web has nothing to do with "view source". It never did. "View source" just makes debugging easier, it's a technical solution to a technical problem.

I think "view source" was essential to the web we have today. It's not just a technical solution to a technical problem - it's an accidental UI/defaults solution to a social problem we didn't realize we had.

(note that, in general, this applies to the web of maybe 15~20 years ago. Geocities, inline styles, table-based layout, the works)

The problem, namely, is how to educate the general internet-using populace on the means of content-creation, and encourage them to actually create. If different companies can put out their web sites or their technologies with slightly reduced barriers on innovation, sure, that's kinda nice I guess. But, the web reaches it's true potential when the average nobody uses it not just to consume, but to create, produce, and publish.

There's a very small subset of the population that can just read an HTML spec (or at best, a tutorial), and actually churn out a working web page at all. Most people like to learn implicitly, by example and by imitating. With "view source" available, any web page you see is an example to learn from - or a code snippet to take, edit, and make your own.

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now-a-days, we're up to our ears in HTML/CSS/JS classes, tutorials, etc., reasonably priced hosting, code snippets, the works. And yet, a smaller percentage of the internet population (and, I think, a smaller absolute number of people) actually create their own website.

Sure, there's more technology to grapple with, and the bar has been raised on what constitutes a "good" website the author would be satisfied with, but I think the real failure is that it's pretty much impossible to read the source of any interesting, non-trivial website.

Its even built into the spec of WASM to at least try to make the bytecode convert into human readable code. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/HighLevelG...

But as you state, its not integral to a "open web". IMO WASM is a long time coming and I think it will drastically help the "open web" which is suffering from some library bloat. Next we need an open and better image format.

This is about as true as the idea that the only use of seeing source code is debugging (or building/deploying your own version of the app).

Which, of course, every developer here knows is not true.

Reading source code is useful for figuring out how to do something you didn't know how to do. It's useful for discovering idioms you didn't know, even if you already knew another way. It's very useful if you're trying to do bookmarklets/extensions/mashups or even more significantly engineered interop.

I don't know if there's a formal gatekeeper out there with a list of all the things that capital-O Officially make the The Open Web(TM) great, so I guess there's no way to settle what's on it.

But I don't know how anyone could argue that these things weren't significant bullet points in a much longer list of reasons why the web has seen faster and broader adoption than any of the competing VMs and why it was/is often more useful and nice to work with despite more limited capabilities.

And I think it goes almost without saying that list is much bigger than the "no single gatekeeper" point.

> you're fighting against WebAssembly because you are ideologically against black box software

I am neither fighting against WebAssembly nor ideologically against any kind of black box software. My earlier comment makes it clear I think WebAssembly has a place (and, more generally, that transpiling does) as well as its hazards.

I am stepping in to point out that Flash and WebAssembly have significant things in common, some of which are tradeoffs against things that have made the Web an effective and proliferating medium.

> [JS] some important deficiencies with respect to typing and static analysis

See my aside about Elm. Given the fact that dynamic languages (including maligned ones like JS and even PHP) seem to be about as equally successful in terms of shipped software as statically manifest typed languages, whether or not even something like TypeScript is really going to give engineering teams an edge seems like far from a settled question to me. But I'm interested to see what happens where we're talking significantly augmented capabilities rather than the largely aesthetic differences that something like CoffeeScript represents.

(Speaking of which: "TypeScript, Flow, Dart, CoffeeScript"... at least one of these things is not like the others if you're invoking static analysis and typing as reasons for transpiling.)

> You say that other people's problems with JS are "superficial", but that's exactly how I see your problems with WebAssembly.

I can't tell exactly what you're saying here, but at a close approximation, it sounds like you might be suggesting that the readability of WebAssembly is going to be on the same order of difficulty that an experienced Python developer has reading idiomatic human-written JS (ie, aesthetic). This is potentially possible, I guess, in a world where everyone writing compilers that target WebAssembly is conscientious at/above the level that the CoffeeScript developers were (CS output is really fairly readable, arguably more so than minified JS). But then again, that's not what the name suggests WebAssembly is for. In practice, most of the time it's probably going to read... a lot like assembly language dressed in C-like syntax.