JS interop via webcomponents is "the way" (vs ports). Re JSON decoding, agreed, and we cover in the episode: it's a solved/solvable problem that isn't popularized via a nice package...yet. But I think you've zero'd in on the pragmatic pain points; webcomponents is the revelation that was missing in the communication on the migration from 18 to 19, unfortunately.
It's funny, I don't believe Elm itself needs much (if any) modification- the language is in a great spot, as are the core libs. I
f you care about it winning the "language wars", it needs more PR, examples, success stories, and tutorials. Here, I'm happy to have contributed in some way(s).
Speaking on the VC side, some the crunch premise is flawed. The crunch is due to a huge explosion of early stage companies (easier than ever to get seeded, less capital than ever needed to get started) w/o a corresponding explosion of A-level capital.
There is no formula for unicorns, I'd dismiss that outright, and even if we found one, every founder would bend their story to adapt superficially, and the forumla would prove useless.
My #1 theory on why people w/ a somewhat logical strategy/thesis fail to raise? Failure to tell a compelling, coherent story about their opportunity, and failure to come across as a compelling "force of nature" founding team.
I do think the question of price discrimination is a really interesting one. Why hasn't anyone been successful suing for that? Why is Tinder being so obvious about it, do their lawyers no something we don't, or are they just that much more risk tolerant?
Hopefully some folks have heard of Boundless now, we make free e-textbooks out of open-source / public domain content and are now used by students at half of all universities.
We have a program to help educators quickly get up to speed using our content with minimal effort
Your opening digression is a bit harsh. We're all experienced web-devs, with the accumulated knowledge of building websites that have reached in excess of several hundred million individuals.
SEO - True. There are many different strategies to deliver solid SEO results using technologies like Spar. You can use headless browsers to pre-render and deliver on-demand rendered content, if you know your URL space completely, you can pre-render all documents. Spar isn't an attempt to solve SEO for you, you may not even care if you are building a phone-gap app, for instance. So does that invalidate the technology?
Accessibility: I'm 100% behind accessibility, and if the compatible tricks don't work... do you still make your site accessible for IE3? No... screen- readers MUST catch up. We can all do what we can to help, but shouldn't engineer for the past, which is an orthogonal concern from accessibile technology choices.
Page-performance - I'll challenge the several orders of magnitude claim, we've seen incredible performance w/ the approach, and best-case you're only talking about first-page speed, even ceding that it becomes a much different story later on... and if you're building an 'app' thats a big difference.
Spar itself requires no knowledge of Ruby, that was one of the design goals. It happens to use Ruby tech under-the-hood, but no user of Spar would ever be exposed to those choices.
Proxlet never made any attempt to block ads (they didn't even exist when we built it!) That said, it's really no different than a normal 3rd party app which could do the same thing. Again, my beef was the manner in which they shut it down abruptly stranding users.
TweetFavor just supports an existing pattern "hey dude, can you tweet this for me?" And permission had to be given per-tweet request, there was no mass zombification. You'd pledge individual tweets. Once again, no reason as to why it was shut down, and certainly no one used it before making the call.
No worries, I don't feel berated. These were hobby projects that people found useful, I have a full-time startup that gets the majority of my attention. So yes, making sure I share yet another cautionary tale. If you read Cappy's comment on my blog there's another excellent cautionary tale in there re FB