G is for Google

Here's my take... It's not a moral decision, it's a financing decision. Larry and Sergey (and their initial backers) made a decision to put this structure in place. Everyone is free to decide to invest or not invest in it. Conventional theory suggests that investors don't like these types of arrangements, and these provisions weigh down the price of the stock. Therefore, the original owners had to accept a smaller valuation based on this.

This isn't a morality thing, it means that the Class A common stock holder are more like bondholders (who put in money without votes) with upside, rather than full owners. But all of them were well informed about this when they put the money in.

This is not to say that we should all invest in Class A shares, just that this structure is one way of many to invest in a company, and people who don't like it can put their money elsewhere.

Ahh! Very interesting if they lose all of the voting rights in the process.

GC and runtime.

A modern GC is a large, complex beast. Python, Ruby, Lua, etc. all have their own implementations of them, and those implementations are specific to the semantics of those languages. (For example, Python's early finalizers. Ruby's FFI, etc.) That's a big blob of code for you to push down the wire with your application every time the user hits your site.

Also, that GC doesn't know how to play nice with the browser's own GC. If you have an event handler that has a reference to some Ruby object that in turn has a reference to some DOM node, neither GC can trace through that path and tell when those objects can be collected. That means you get memory leaks.

On top of that, the language implementation itself is large. The Python executable on my machine is 2 MB. Do you want to add another 2 MB to your app? Is Python enough better than JS to justify forcing all of your users on their crappy mobile networks to download that before any interactivity begins on your page? What about when you start using the additional 45 MB of standard library that comes with Python?

Also, how do you make those standard libraries work in a browser? Who is going to rewrite them all to stop using the native OS libraries they currently use and instead rely on APIs that are available in JS?

That's not to say this is an insurmountable problem. But my belief is that it's a big enough headache to outweigh the benefits you would get from writing your app in another higher level language.

Now, if your language can compile to JavaScript and has a decently small runtime library, that's a different story. At that point, you're back to only one GC and relatively little overhead for your language's semantics and core libraries. It means you don't have to worry about a large existing standard library that #includes everything under the sun.

This is why I think CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, Dart, etc. are feasible. But I don't think anyone will be writing web apps in Ruby or Python anytime soon. Languages that look syntactically similar to them (Opal, Red, Pyjamas, Brython, etc.), sure. But the real deal where you can have some app that does, I don't know, "import requests" and have it actually work in a shippably-sized web app? I think that's going to be a much harder path.

It's a great goal for the WebAssembly folks to work towards, but it's an aspirational goal.

> Is it?

Yes. They first used the word when referring to Andy Rubin's departure from Android.

Cisco has the stereotype (at least here in the South Bay) that it has almost only Indian employees. There is also the idea that since Cisco hired so many Indians, it is now no longer considered an American company (I don't seem to be able to find the link anymore). Finally, there is the rumor that Indians only hire Indians. So after all these stereotypes you would think Cisco would have an Indian CEO.

Here are some links: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-bias-among-Indians-of-hir...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1831365/posts