The thin-client revolution is finally here, and what an awful pile of shit it is. Whatever happened to software that just works?
Answer: Microsoft. Their legal team started the browser-as-OS delusion with their 1990s freakout about Netscape; this was an anti-consumer, anti-competitive lock-in strategy which now masquerades as a fundamental principle of Good Clean Living for people who give speeches about their startup's Beautiful, Human Responsive Javascript Libraries or their genius-revealing reimplementations of Emacs that can only edit one language (namely Javascript.)
Hence today instead of having a computer, we have DMCA-hardened thin clients, and with each click we download what amounts to a freshly-coded never-debugged malware-infected EULA-wrapped software update; and when you enter a subway tunnel the whole universe stops working.
Yet on the linked essay he likens turning off Javascript to removing the steering wheel from your car, which I find to be both idiotic and revealing: Your steering wheel doesn't stop working when your car goes into a tunnel. But you can see why a Googler thinks like this: Google makes a car with no steering wheel, which really might stop working properly when it loses signal in a tunnel. The real benefit of Thin Client is to the employment prospects of Javascript programmers, to the Google whose Android and browser and Javascript VM you will need to do anything useful or performant on Googlephones, and to the war criminals in technology, finance, and intelligence who carry out the destruction of human culture via airdrop of free surveillance-gathering Javascript phones, where Responsive Javascript libraries conspire with distant servers to jack up the valuations of this or that group of ten HN-darling companies, and hire three or four guys to make sure the top comment always defends Apple's weekly anti-competitive "this is what's best for consumers" move, or reminds users that There Is No Way To Prove This Isn't Another Tech Bubble.
The whole concept of browser-as-OS has turned out to serve the permanent security state and other old-money beneficiaries of the Bronze Age kulturkampf. Thanks to the thin-client revolution and DMCA, secure software that actually WORKS is mostly illegal.
A while back I attempted a Common Lisp version of visual programming, drawing heavily on the syntax innovations of Jens Monig's "Smalltalk Elements", which was a research language attempting to simplify Scratch syntax and move it closer to a pure smalltalk-like metaphor.
I'm not terribly confident that visual programming will ever really come into its own. But I think the combination with Lisp could be really useful, and I'm still doing some work in this area.
EDIT: Just looked around for Jens Monig's "Smalltalk Elements" but it seems the original page is gone...