&gt; What makes WebAssembly like Flash? Please elaborate.<p>It&#x27;s pretty straightforward. Both tend towards the Big Binary Blackbox Blob.<p>It&#x27;s true that WebAssembly has advantages Flash, Java, and Silverlight didn&#x27;t <i>really</i> have in terms of being freely reimplimentable and (potentially) native to the browser. And it&#x27;s probably a good thing that a browser <i>can</i> be a VM via a target-intended subset of JS. BBBB may be the right thing for some applications.<p>But to the extent that the browser becomes something developers see <i>primarily</i> as The VM That Lived (and there are clearly a lot of developers in this boat) yes, we&#x27;re forgetting lessons we should have already learned from the difference between Flash&#x2F;Java and the open web.<p>&gt; You already can&#x27;t just read someone&#x27;s JavaScript code if they&#x27;re using a transpiler or uglify or something like that, it looks like line noise and you basically have to go through a lot of work to reverse engineer it. WebAssembly is no worse.<p>I&#x27;m clearly in the minority, but I had qualms about uglify and other source manglers from the beginning for the same reasons people have qualms about Web Assembly: they break the benefits of view source.<p>I get that they can also be tools that help squeeze out performance, and I use them selectively for that reason, but as far as I can tell, most of the web development world uses this as an excuse to stop actually thinking about the issue -- and for that matter, to stop thinking about how they&#x27;re putting together their web app (&quot;we&#x27;re using minification and gzip and doing an SPA using Ember&#x2F;Angular&#x2F;LatestDesktopLikeFramework because that&#x27;s what professionals do now, why do we have performance problems?&quot;).<p>Similarly, I&#x27;ve seen a lot of people use compiling to JS as an end run around what are essentially aesthetic&#x2F;subjective issues with JS as a language when they&#x27;d probably do just as well spending more time learning to use it (as far as I can tell in years of working with all of them, JS is in exactly the same league with Python and Ruby and Perl other similar dynamic languages). That doesn&#x27;t mean there are no beneficial cases for JS as a target (personally, I&#x27;m intrigued by Elm), but I think I&#x27;m justified in being afraid that people will use it as insulation from superficial problems.<p>&gt; that force you to write code in Lisp<p>Lisp doesn&#x27;t force you to write code in Lisp. That&#x27;s one of the reasons why it&#x27;s awesome -- and potentially horrible. Transpiling&#x2F;compiling can be similarly awesome and potentially horrible for a lot of the same reasons.