Panel / Q&A discussion at wroclove.rb 2018 in which Ruby developers on stage took moderator and audience questions about the state of JavaScript and the frontend. Topics: jQuery vs prototype ('none of it, because you don't have to anymore' — querySelector + a ~35KB build-size saving); which JS fads stood the test of time (CSS-in-JS gaining traction, Angular/Ember still around, reactive programming shared by React+MobX and Ember with state-driven virtual DOM); whether everyone will be JavaScript-only in two years (no — Node competes with Rails/Elixir on the backend, Ruby/Elixir/etc. remain viable, transpilers like Opal and PureScript reduce lock-in); whether Opal can be production tech (it missed its window when Rails chose the Webpacker/ES route); whether JavaScript will survive or become a compile target (likely stays forever due to DOM coupling but will lose importance); dream frameworks in a year (TC39 proposals like the pipeline operator and class modifiers via Babel, more reactive programming, PWAs arriving in Safari manifests and Windows, Microsoft pushing TypeScript and PWA possibly at .NET's expense); JSON API vs GraphQL (JSON API is decent but don't follow it religiously — lacks file-upload standard, JSON API Resources gem frustrations, creator working on 'operations' plugin); Stimulus (DHH's HTML-from-Rails library — panel barely knows it); TypeScript and Flow (strongly recommended for maintainability, refactoring, pre-runtime feedback; Microsoft actively integrates TS with the JS ecosystem); WebAssembly (run code after the first bytes load, tree-shakable modules, dramatic perf boost); LinkedIn case study: Yehuda Katz rewrote Ember's Glimmer rendering engine to Rust and compiled to wasm, beating Preact for initial load after an earlier Preact-based rewrite of the LinkedIn main page (Preact was fastest for first-time load before the wasm experiment, which yielded a 0.3–0.5× better initial load time); closing observation that Microsoft has shifted from the web developer's 'bad guy' to a 'good guy' under the post-Ballmer leadership — promoting TypeScript, rebuilding LinkedIn in Ember, using MobX for the new Outlook.