> I think there will be very few, if any, web developers who started out of their own interest and exploration instead of solely thinking of it as a profession
If that were the case, why do people get interested in programming in any non-interpreted language without thinking about it as a profession? I have trouble seeing this as a big step backwards in this regard since there are plenty of non-interpreted languages that kids in high school have gotten interested in themselves, even when there wasn't nearly as many good resources for learning them online.
I also don't see a huge difference between Web Assembly and minified javascript. Sure, with the later you could in theory piece through it without a disassembler, but if that is your introduction into the language I doubt you'll learn much at all (or want to). The gap grows even smaller when you take into the account the fact that Web Assembly is desired to replace asm.js, which was already incredibly obfuscated.
> Computing systems are becoming more closed and proprietary, and this will be a big step backwards in terms of openness of the Web that lead to its growth and freedom in the first place.
Web assembly was developed publicly from pretty much the very beginning on GitHub. We live in a world where the biggest closed-source players have open sourced implementations of their programming languages/platforms, compilers and all (e.g. OpenJDK, .NET Core, Roslyn, Swift). There are no popular languages around now where the leading implementations aren't open source. If this is what "becoming more closed and proprietary" looks like, then I can't say I'm opposed.
If that were the case, why do people get interested in programming in any non-interpreted language without thinking about it as a profession? I have trouble seeing this as a big step backwards in this regard since there are plenty of non-interpreted languages that kids in high school have gotten interested in themselves, even when there wasn't nearly as many good resources for learning them online.
I also don't see a huge difference between Web Assembly and minified javascript. Sure, with the later you could in theory piece through it without a disassembler, but if that is your introduction into the language I doubt you'll learn much at all (or want to). The gap grows even smaller when you take into the account the fact that Web Assembly is desired to replace asm.js, which was already incredibly obfuscated.
> Computing systems are becoming more closed and proprietary, and this will be a big step backwards in terms of openness of the Web that lead to its growth and freedom in the first place.
Web assembly was developed publicly from pretty much the very beginning on GitHub. We live in a world where the biggest closed-source players have open sourced implementations of their programming languages/platforms, compilers and all (e.g. OpenJDK, .NET Core, Roslyn, Swift). There are no popular languages around now where the leading implementations aren't open source. If this is what "becoming more closed and proprietary" looks like, then I can't say I'm opposed.