Both of these posts, Atwood's and Braude's, are complete messes.
Braude tries to compare the development of entire desktop applications with the UI development/document presentation of web applications.
Web UI development should be compared to UI development on the desktop. I wish I could use Swing/GTK/Qt for my web UIs, or write my blog with Word, but instead we have to use HTML and DOM scripting. The web is a crappy UI framework with an excellent distribution method. The internal differences of desktop applications and web applications are typically a matter of scale.
"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Dear god, no! The browser is not the web. The future is not photoshop in a browser, it's a photoshop UI (hopefully developed with a rational desktop GUI framework) with a network connection (HTTP?) to a processing server. Of course, that's not particularly new, it's X11.
"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Dear god, no! The browser is not the web. The future is not photoshop in a browser, it's a photoshop UI (hopefully developed with a rational desktop GUI framework) with a network connection (HTTP?) to a processing server. Of course, that's not particularly new, it's X11.