I'm really interested in John's switch because, as far as I know, at Mozilla he was working on JavaScript evangelism and performance, but at Khan Academy he'll actually be building software which I think is a pretty large change.
John works mostly as the maintainer for the Khan-exercises open source project, basically the Exercise Dashboard piece of Khan Academy.
Remember, it's open source[1], so don't hesitate to join in and help revolutionize education. There's some very cool and interesting things we're working on that get used by millions of kids (and adults!) everyday. You know some js, python, HTML/CSS? Interested in documentation, searching for bugs, or doing usability testing? You're cordially invited.
He actually did a number of pure development projects while working at Mozilla, both Firefox-related (like the FUEL library) and jQuery-related (like creating the jQuery Mobile framework):
This is great news. After watching Salman Khan's speech at TED I got really excited about what he's trying to do for education. I really wish more public schools would shift their focus from in-class lectures to working with students in a more personal way.
I certainly hope the site gets more contributors from other disciplines, the majority of their content is still mathematics. Anyhow... I'm excited to see where they take this in the future.
I think its interesting how he notes that a lot of server-side devs can't make it as client-side devs. This seems like a big change from 15 years ago when UI development was considered easy and server side dev was considered more difficult.
I think that was a mistaken impression even then. Believe me, table-based layout on a large scale was not for the lazy, and early CSS was a minefield.
The big difference 15 years ago is that everything was so fresh, and so few people knew how to make anything good, that everyone was really forgiving. You could go really far with lousy design. And you had to, because designing something un-lousy was a lot more work.
Actually, I wasn't thinking webdev when I said that, but I guess it does apply to webdev. I was thinking more like VB front-ends.
But I think your general thesis holds in any case. As front-ends have become less CRUDdy (whether web or rich), and almost more game like, they've become more challenging to build. And I think the DOM is a legacy model which is great for largely static pages, but a far less useful model for actual web apps -- and that just makes client dev work harder too.
