It only occurred to me reading this now, and musing about the code size and relative performance of simple programs written first in a to-be-compiled-to-JS language and then in JS, that the folks associated with these pushes are taking the sufficiently smart compiler position. Connected to superinferiority?

If the thesis is sound, then logically we should expect the instances where people have decided to "use terribly slow scripting and techniques" to produce better programs; the not-slow (non-"scripting") stuff to be worse.

You can only pick one:

• software is worse because hardware improvements mean that what were previously noticeable inefficiencies are no longer noticeable
• programs that are written in low-level languages and don't as much incur runtime overheads are better on average because they're written in low-level languages that aren't as wasteful

Corollary: Spolsky (at least at the time of this article) didn't really understand types, having about the same grasp on computing fundamentals as your average C programmer.

The thing that gets me about takes like this is that it's all the stuff below the Web content layer that accounts for what makes all this stuff harder than it needs to be.

What's the hard part about distributing content (static or not, but let's go with static for simplicity)? It's registering a domain, updating DNS, and keeping a Web server up—all systems that have nothing to do with the "infernal" trio and also generally programmed in what are typically described as saner languages and their traditions. It's either that, or it's relying on somebody else, like GitHub Pages, and integrating the implementation details/design decisions for their value-add into your workflow.

To "build a platform" is ambiguous, but it sounds a lot like "creating a server-side application to serve non-static content and handle associated requests". Is the infernal trio to blame for the difficulties of that, too?