> Viewing "pages" and "apps" as wholly separate and mutually hostile paradigms seems to be a recent cultural development born more out of frustration with advertising and modern complexity than any technically meaningful distinction between the two.
Well there is a pretty fundamental tension between programs written in a Turing-complete language and a program written in one that is not. Resorting to too much power too early is dangerous and messy.
>Well there is a pretty fundamental tension between programs written in a Turing-complete language and a program written in one that is not.
Maybe, but you still can't consider anything running javascript an "app" and anything not a "document," since interactivity and state isn't bound to running javascript, and most javascript is just used to render documents.
My point is that the distinction people draw between the two is more emotional than technical.
>Resorting to too much power too early is dangerous and messy.
To be fair, notwithstanding exploits in the underlying browser or hardware which lead to things like Spectre, at least javascript is sandboxed. No one is going to be able to sneak "rm -rf /*" into a script and have it work the way they could a native application.
> To be fair, notwithstanding exploits in the underlying browser or hardware which lead to things like Spectre, at least javascript is sandboxed. No one is going to be able to sneak "rm -rf /*" into a script and have it work the way they could a native application.
It is fair to note this, but I would still take those examples as indicating the inherent dangers and failures of the paradigm. It's obviously infinitely better than just naively sticking native code execution into the browser without any protection at all, but that does not mean it is ultimately a good approach.
Well there is a pretty fundamental tension between programs written in a Turing-complete language and a program written in one that is not. Resorting to too much power too early is dangerous and messy.