Building WebApps Like It’s 1972 | JSConf EU 2019

The year is 1972 and GUI applications like no one has seen before are being built in Smalltalk: bitmaps graphics, draggable elements, drop-down menus, collapsable windows 🤯; all of them and many more coming straight from the future, powered by asynchronous message passing, object orientation, and functional programming. An unprecedented cocktail to be later rediscovered as the Actor-model. Fast forward to the present day, and typical web applications are modeled as monolithic deeply nested structures, resembling the medium the web was built for (HTML), but leaving us handicapped to build outstanding user facing applications. 🦖 Let’s explore together what we can learn from the early days of UIs, languages like Erlang and Smalltalk, the Actor-model, and how we can apply some of these principles and ideas today to take our UIs back to the future 🚀