I think you took the wrong tone from the parent comment; it sounds like this person was genuinely interested in sparking a real conversation about how people feel about the environment that they spend time in, and whether that could have dramatically shifted based on what they decided to or had to learn
I feel like if this person was interested in “sparking a conversation,” they wouldn’t open said conversation with “I hate how bloated web abstractions are, but I guess they’re popular for some reason,” with the exact same digs at electron that have been rehashed in every HN comment section.
I agree, to be clear — I use many of said abstractions, and they’re often quite bloated and everything else this person is complaining about. This just doesn’t strike me as someone who’s asking for insight; it’s just complaining, and it’s fine to point that out.
Others said they didn't get the same tone as I did, so maybe I'm off there. I'm willing to reconsider.
I'll just give my opinion on the final sentence which I guess is the conversation we should be on.
"And the thing is, I don’t know if I just learned web dev if I would love this new approach to software that is eating the world and I would “get it”. Or if it just exists because JavaScript developers don’t want to learn something new."
I think the answer to this is a resounding "No, if you're not a web developer you will not 'just get it'".
I don't think one approach or the other is 'better', but it just depends on what your background is and how you got into programming, and that's fine.
These tools are meant for web developers. We are talking about the next iteration of NodeJS here. It's the whole point is that it merges web programming with systems programming. So if you're not a web developer, there really is no good reason to jump over unless you are just curious.
From the blog post:
"The Deno company hopes to enable the millions of web programmers out there to maximally leverage their craft in other domains."
