It all starts as a stream. That is the "universal format".
sed was designed to edit streams. A stream can be transformed via stream editing into any text format, for any downstream consumer. It's line based. That's the only limitation.
lex can handle multiline "records". There is nothing you cannot do with lex. But only if you know how to use it. It's usually faster than any scripting language. Worth learning to use? Your choice. But it is what it is. It works. It, or some clone of it, was used to build the compiler that someone used to compile the shared library you're using as part of your special solution for the format of the month.
If you produce a stream as JSON, that's great. But now we're limited to consumers that understand JSON.
If you know your consumer wants JSON, then sure use some specialised library. But that's not what this guy is suggesting. He wants everything in JSON.
Well, not every consumer wants JSON.
This is a case of "I learned [X]. Please everyone use [X]."
None of us want to have to learn every language and every application.
Now consider if [X] is UNIX. For better or worse, it's the foundation on which most stuff talked about here runs. Perhaps it seems crude, it lacks sophistication in the eyes of a younger generation. It's a "hammer". But what can you build without a "hammer"?
In his case, [X] is Javascript. What's the foundation for Javascript? A "web browser".
Perhaps some people think nothing is possible without a web browser that can run Javascript.
The question for those looking at the TOS is: What is it you do not want Google to do? Unless you know the answer to that, reading TOS is a mindless exercise. You need to supply some facts, a real scenario. Then we can assess whether the TOS are reasonable.
Google can say "what's yours stays yours". They could say also that to website content owners with respect to their web crawls. But the simple fact is they have a copy of someone else's data, they know what the contents are and they will use that knowledge of the contents (aggregated and de-personalised if necessary) to their own benefit, by using it to lure more web users and thereby advertisers. It works. That's how they make money. Of course given the chance they will require an explicit license from you to do so. Here, that's the TOS. With the web crawls, I guess it's robots.txt. There's an implicit license.
What I'd like to see discussed is what happens if you encrypt some multi-GB binary blob of random bytes, give it an attention-grabbing filename and then move it to cloud storage. Does a team of cryptographers start trying to crack it? Now that's a fun legal question.
I really do not understand the whole cloud storage thing. I imagine the real issue is people do not know how to move large amounts of data to each other, quickly and securely. They've never heard of netcat. And "storage" with a "link to download" is their solution. File sharing. Same old story.
Everything gets funnelled through a webserver.
Quite silly if you can directly connect to the recipient.
Doubtful. Yahoo rewrote Viaweb in C or C++, didn't they?
There's a reason why so many programmers still use CGI scripts. And why they depend on a host of scripting languages that rely on external libraries written by others.
Perhaps it's because they just don't grasp what Paul Graham is describing. They can't comprehend languages like Lisp or Forth or developing incrementally from an interpreter prompt.
And they don't need to. "Web 2.0" is an easy sell, no matter how crappy the "web apps" are, no matter what library-dependent, inflexible language they are written in. "Market forces" inhibit the few folks who do understand Lisp and Forth from spending more serious time with those languages.
The web browser as a UI. Brilliant. Programmers and end-users (a group to which programmers themselves belong) are getting smarter every day.
Anyway, you're right. It is definitely more advanced. Let's keep that in mind as we're looking at what's coming down the pipe hence forward and marvelling at what some will portray as "innovation".
Paul Graham: "$50m companies innovate. Mine did. We basically invented the web app. We were doing complex stuff in LISP when everyone else was doing CGI scripts. And, quite frankly, $50m is no small thing. "
Of course, no one uses CGI now. It's all complex stuff done in LISP. Innovation is amazing, isn't it?
That's why he wrote "as expected...".