I'm getting tired of fighting an uphill battle here. Web technologies have overwhelming dev mindshare; all the cool things happen either as web pages or Electron apps now (which are even worse than web pages, because raw browsers we can upfix a bit with userscripts and plugins).

> terminal will still continue to serve the scientific computing community well

I hope so, but note how data is on the web, the output is expected to be on the web (so others can consume it), collaboration is expected to be on the web, and now you can code things on the web... Everything is moving into the browser.

> the output is expected to be on the web

That's no more true now than it has been for the past 10 to 15 years. However, output is just one view; something that automatically generates HTML to display things, like scientific data, is great, but that's far from the only, or even primary, way that many things are consumed from the internet.

Other views exist that can visualise the same data in other ways. That is, data can be available online without necessarily being web first. Heck, most things are — data provided to mobile apps and desktop clients via services that might have a web frontend.

My personal thinking is that people really are too hooked on this narrative about the browser as an OS, and maybe have gotten tunnel vision from it.

The internet, as it is today, is still mainly services. Many things may be more and more accessible in the web by preference, yet remain freely available and consumable through other forms (REST APIs, direct database access, etc) and delivered through apps and integrations within operating systems. Some examples might include:

- Dropbox: files sync with the various apps and utilities - iCloud: mail, contact, calendar are mostly consumed by the native apps. Pages, Keynote, Numbers documents are mostly edited in the Mac apps. - Office 365: the Windows apps remain the dominant way to access and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. - Github: the most popular source code repository today, but still very much consumed at the command line. The website is strongest at wiki editing, forums, and so on, but the bulk of code moving back and forth done with the `git` command or IDE integration.

Let us not underestimate how much of the internet is not primarily consumed in web browsers and likely never will be through the vast majority of certain markets (for instance, developers), where internet-located data will be consumed as services that interact with apps much more than as web sites.

> That's no more true now than it has been for the past 10 to 15 years.

It is, though. 10 years ago I'd expect to get a PDF or an .XLS or a bundle of Matlab code. Maybe a static page. Today, if you can't interactively explore the data in the browser, it's considered subpar.

> The internet, as it is today, is still mainly services. Many things may be more and more accessible in the web by preference, yet remain freely available and consumable through other forms (REST APIs, direct database access, etc) and delivered through apps and integrations within operating systems

Disagree. The Internet may be mostly services, but they're services with default UIs you're forced to use, and are not freely consumable through other forms. REST APIs are restricted both in terms of features and what ToS allows you, and more often than not you couldn't build an alternative UI with feature parity to the original one.

> Dropbox: files sync with the various apps and utilities

Sorta, kinda. Can I have an alternative implementation of the Dropbox client? The problem isn't bad here though - Dropbox does one thing and does it well, i.e. syncing files with real OS-es and their filesystems. You can work with that to the extent your OS lets you.

> Pages, Keynote, Numbers ... Office 365

All being increasingly replaced by Google Docs, because it's free and you already have an account. You can't edit those outside the browser.

> Github

Exception, not the rule, and it's an artifact of the fact that developers still mostly work on desktop OSes with real filesystems. I'm worried about the future in which we'll all be using some future evolution of VS Code in the browser, communicating with future Github in the background over some APIs you can't hook into.

I'm not saying everything is in the browser now. But it sure as hell looks like in 10 years it'll all be.

> Today, if you can't interactively explore the data in the browser, it's considered subpar.

PDFs still remain a primary form of interchange for academic documentation. People who really want to crunch the data will want raw data files or some sort of common interchange format.

> but they're services with default UIs you're forced to use

I gave a bunch of examples where you're not forced to use them. Most of the popular web services are also available through apps on mobile.

> REST APIs are restricted both in terms of features and what ToS allows you

For public REST APIs, sure. For private use, it's still things like REST and whatnot that power desktop and mobile apps, bringing data from those internet-based services to local clients, completely bypassing the web.

> Can I have an alternative implementation of the Dropbox client?

You can, but that isn't the point. The point is that the Dropbox client, the executable program or mobile app, is how people tend to use Dropbox. If not that, people also connect to Dropbox through alternative third party apps.

Completely possibly, and I wager mostly the case, to bypass the web.

> All being increasingly replaced by Google Docs

Citation needed.

> You can't edit those outside the browser

You can, using Google's apps. They're not fantastic, but that's not the app's fault, that's Google's. Meanwhile, iWork and Office 365 let one easily edit documents with the desktop and mobile apps — and Office remains king of the hill in enterprise, whatever people may wish to believe.

> Exception, not the rule

But still highly relevant.

> I'm not saying everything is in the browser now. But it sure as hell looks like in 10 years it'll all be

It really doesn't. There's no pattern from which to base this. Apps are far more popular, especially thanks to the rise of smartphones; the web remains a convoluted mess of inconsistent looks and feels that increasingly assume a high-quality broadband connection even though there are still vast portions of the developed world that still don't have adequate internet to completely shift away from local apps; and plenty of enterprises still run on older versions of software and standards.

When one examines the whole picture, the web is far from being as ubiquitous as you imagine it to be or shall be — it's merely the next biggest alternative that happens to be huge.

> all the cool things happen either as web pages or Electron apps now

There are also plenty of cool things on mobile OSes.

Most of which are webpages in a webview these days; mobile software is also much more skewed towards casual use due to device form factor. Here I'm focusing on more professional or even prosumer use cases.

Not really, plenty of native code as well.

Also both iOS and Android have very interesting architecture features, still not widespread on desktop OSes.

> Also both iOS and Android have very interesting architecture features, still not widespread on desktop OSes.

Most of those are heavily favouring security at the expense of interoperability and user control. Not exactly the direction I'd like things to see heading on the desktop. Compared to laptops and PCs, mobile devices are essentially interactive TVs.

From architecture point of view there are plenty of interesting things to explore beyond security.

But yeah, I want to see sandboxes everywhere and also enjoy the direction that OS X and Windows are going into that regard.