There are benefits to having the same type system throughout a code base. Also Typescript is a really nice language.
The other issue is, many websites are basically apps. The HTML is a byproduct, it isn't the main event. The template based systems are fine if you have mostly plain HTML with some interactivity sprinkled in, but for people who are building complex web apps, there is typically a tiny bit of HTML and a lot of logic.
The old template based systems fall to pieces for really complicated sites.
In regards to language, if you are going to pick a JITed or interpreted language, may as well pick one that has had a lot of effort put into making it fast, and the JS runtimes are really optimized by now. Java is faster, but Typescript is a much better language (and more type safe!) than Java.
Agree that TypeScript is nice, especially for sharing templates and types between server and client. But you can still use TypeScript on the server without sending it all to the client, and without a complex and insecure protocol like RSC. I’m working on making this as simple and dependency-free as possible: https://mastrojs.github.io
For the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.
A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes.
The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello
piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.)
Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots.
With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.
Microsoft OneNote had this back in 2007 or so, granted the speech to text model wasn't nearly as advanced as they are now.
I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.
It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.
I remember trying out some voice-to-text around 2002 that I believe was included with Windows XP.. or maybe Office?
You had to go through some training exercises to tune it to your voice, but then it worked fairly well for transcription or even interacting with applications.
That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.
Once we have direct neural inputs VR will explode. Or at least the ability to wire directly into the optic nerves.
VR, or at least AR, is obviously the future. But Meta, like so many companies before them, saw the future and tried to jump on board way before it was the right time. See: WebTV, the tablet PCs from the early 1990s (!!), Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, etc. (I call it the first mover disadvantage!)
When I was 17 I was hired by a startup to write a book. The end product was a complete disaster (don't hire a 17 year old to write a book, also don't enter into contracts with 17 year old high school students w/o informing parents.)
The book was on 3d modeling in Rhino 3d. I was really good at Rhino3d at that time, to the extent that using it felt like a natural extension of my hands. IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has.
I had to learn how to translate my absolute love of Rhino3D onto a page and explain it to other people. It was hard. It made my brain work in ways it was not used to, but it was an incredibly valuable experience.
The only remaining copy of the book sits behind me on a bit rotted CDR.
I have had 3 types of math teachers in life. American teachers, who generally teach rules from a book according to a curriculum. Russian teachers, who have a passion and a love for the field and who teach how to intuitive the answer to math problems first before going all in on the formulas. And East Asian math teachers who show off the beauty of the equations themselves.
I had one math teacher who couldn't speak English. He didn't need to, he had an incredible ability to communicate math through pure equations. It was lovely, one of the best math classes I've ever had. Math was truly used as a universal language.
I had another teacher (Russian) who got so excited solving equations and explaining DiffEq that he'd break his chalk in half and he'd go diving under desks to pick up the pieces.
But it is artists who are some of the best at transmitting intuitive knowledge. They have centuries of best practices of how to train students to rewrite their brains to literally see the world differently. (And yes a lot of it does involve drawing boring still lives of fruit bowls! But, hey, it works)
TLDR: Michael Gibson is the brain child for Rhino3D's UI.
Yup. I know some of this story.
It's been a minute, so I forget some details...
Ages ago, Robert McNeel & Assoc had been working on the geometry kernel for years. They had high value customers who needed very correct results, not available (from other kernels) at the time. By that time, being a VAR, McNeel had experience with most commercial offerings.
Not having their own front end, they had to import/export to other CADD systems. One of their motivations for reverse engineering AutoCAD's DWG format.
McNeel stumbled onto Sculptura. A mesh modeler written by a solo dev. As I remember it, Sculptura's UI was innovative, amazing, and norm breaking. Exactly what McNeel was looking for. They bought it asap. (Gods, I wish I could quickly remember that guy's name.)
McNeel's intent was to synthesize Sculptura's UI and their state of art kernel.
McNeel had the dual luxury of time and no installed base (legacy). Their initiative motivation was a correct kernel. Like correctly joining 3 curving surfaces. (Their canonical example at the time was to accurately model a styrofoam egg carton.) Which took years of R&D.
So they had time to really nail Rhino3D's UI.
Aha. I just found the official history. My memory wasn't too far off.
Michael Gibson! Yay! I now recall him grinding away on Rhino. Whenever I visited McNeel, he loved giving demos, talking about ideas, etc. Great guy. (We were both young, surrounded by olds, so had that connection.)
I grew up in Seattle and attended West Seattle High School. The technology teacher (whose name I forget, but I can remember his face and voice!) decided to teach us Rhino3d. That went on to me talking about Rhino on Slashdot one day and a digital book publishing startup noticed my comment, and eventually offered me a job of writing a book about Rhino.
I actually haven't used Rhino for much of anything for decades now, I think the last time I used it was to build a scale model of my old town home. I cannot really justify spending $1000 on a program that I would only boot up once every few months for fun. But I have kept love for it all these years, every time I have started it up (downloaded a trial to get some particular task done) I was able to continue right where I left off making things.
I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.
The other issue is, many websites are basically apps. The HTML is a byproduct, it isn't the main event. The template based systems are fine if you have mostly plain HTML with some interactivity sprinkled in, but for people who are building complex web apps, there is typically a tiny bit of HTML and a lot of logic.
The old template based systems fall to pieces for really complicated sites.
In regards to language, if you are going to pick a JITed or interpreted language, may as well pick one that has had a lot of effort put into making it fast, and the JS runtimes are really optimized by now. Java is faster, but Typescript is a much better language (and more type safe!) than Java.
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