If it doesn’t break backward-compatibility there wouldn’t be a need to release a new major version (which very few people have the stomach for anyway).
I can only speak to Elixir. Elixir/Erlang/BEAM/OTP have less raw horsepower than, say, Rust, but they can potentially leapfrog “faster” platforms when under load due to predictable latency and almost linear scaling and system resource utilization.
I’ve developed with Elixir professionally for 2 years and it’s a really enjoyable language and ecosystem. So much thought has gone into the design of the language and its standard libraries, and that meticulousness has extended to most of the popular 3rd-party packages. Stability is great; I remember reading or hearing that there is no intent to ever make an Elixir 2.0. Devtools are great with the only major exception being IDE/LSP integration (still a WIP). The community is also less fragmented than other.
If the BEAM becomes a bottleneck, Elixir also lets you write NIFs (Natively Implemented Functions) in Rust (using Rustler) or other languages like Zig (using Zigler).
Are you trying to find a new role or build something for yourself?
Is an SPA actually required? You might be able to build what you need using tools that involve less mental and technical overhead. Take a look at htmx, UnPoly, Rails/Hotwire, Phoenix LiveView, and/or Laravel LiveWire. Or maybe even good old-fashioned server-rendered HTML if you don’t need to build something that’s highly interactive.
I’m not against people being billionaires if they pay a fair share of their wealth in taxes every year. The reality in America is that the tax system is lopsided.
Even in the lowest tax brackets, workers still have to deal with payroll taxes. On the other hand, if your income is derived from investments, you escape payroll taxes __and__ you pay less in capital gains taxes than you would in normal income taxes. In other words, we pay a higher share of our income that we earn from doing actual work than many billionaires do on passive income.
Not to mention all the loopholes tailor-made for billionaires and corporations.
Anyways, regarding the mechanics of trickle-down economics, concentrating more wealth in the hands of the wealthy is, from a morally neutral “let’s just grow our GDP” standpoint, bad for the economy. Folks who already have everything they need/want may, given a few more billion dollars, buy a mega yacht here or make a trip to space there, but most of it will be hoarded away or, worse, used to influence policy so they can rake in more billions. If you spread those billions among the less wealthy, they’re more likely to go out and spend it on necessities, which puts more money in the hands of people who need it, and so on. The faster that money circulates, the more GDP grows.
It’s shocking how many Americans can be persuaded to hand over their hard-earned money and worship the thieves at the same time. As if they’ll somehow be getting that money back.
Microsoft __chose__ to use Blink, ostensibly because they felt that maintaining EdgeHTML was too costly. On iOS, you either use WebKit or your browser is technically and legally banned.
> hand wave away front-end state management as something that no longer applies
Does client-side state often need to exist independently of server-side state? I’m having trouble imagining a shopping cart or email draft being optimal UX-wise without the ability to resume on a different device.
For things like dropdowns and modals, you can bring in _hyperscript, Bootstrap, Alpine, or even CSS hacks (my preferred approach).
> the rich and bountiful lands of JSX and TypeScript
One person’s richness is another person’s needless complexity.
JSX is cool when you first try it, but the novelty wears off (at least for me it did). There are superior templating languages (Django, Jinja, EEx, erb) that don’t require bizarre syntax such as nested ternaries, and they make it feel like you’re just using a slightly-enhanced superset of HTML (not to mention being able to use them to render things other than HTML).
As for TypeScript, with the checks stripped out at runtime, you’ll still need to validate and test the assumptions your typed code is making. Frankly, TS seems like busywork to me.
Finally, Progressive Enhancement is a thing with htmx. You might be able to have it with React, but then you introduce even more complexity into the build system.
I’m fairly sold on abolishing time zones, but arguing that they make a programmer’s job harder is not a compelling argument when we’re a small percentage of the population. Yeah, it’s annoying, but that’s just part of our job. What’s really important is the impact on the general population.
Programmers are not the only people who deal with timezone problems daily, and as the world becomes more connected, more and more people will have to deal with them
If Timezones are difficult for programmers to model into our systems, then they are likely difficult for everyone to model in their brains
Simplifying the model benefits everyone, not just programmers
Does it really simplify the model? It rephrases my google query if I want to call a colleague in the Philippines. That's it. It does not make it better, easier, harder. It rephrases the question, it does not abolish the question.
On the consumer side, there was 95, then 98, then 98 SE (Second Edition), and then ME.