Renowned Entomologist Says 'Get Rid of Your Lawn' - <AUTHOR> https://news.wttw.com/2019/10/02/fearing-insect-apocalypse-renowned-entomologist-says-get-rid-your-lawn <comment><USER2> Getting rid of our lawn and growing other stuff has been amazingly fulfilling. I have fresh produce most of the year, I've got honeybees and bumblebees and mason bees coming around. I have to do a lot less maintenance, and when I do it's more varied and interesting.

Everything from fruit trees to berries, flowers to vegetables, herbs to herbal teas like chamomile.

Strongly recommend looking at what will grow in your area and start replacing your lawn. Chunk out a four by four foot section and grow some sugar peas and tell me it wasn't a thousand times more rewarding than a lawn.

<comment><USER3> Since having kids I've been realising that a lot of the things in life that _other_ people do, that have never made sense to me, suddenly make a whole lot more sense in the context of kids.

With a kid, I'm suddenly super grateful for my little lawn.

<comment><USER4> When I was a kid, our (huge) back yard was more orchard than yard. It had at least 30 fruit trees, including cherry, apple, pear, peach and plum. There were hazelnuts, brambles and raspberries. Next to that was a patch of land with all kinds of produce.

I loved playing in that yard. It had great places to hide. Ample trees to climb. Wildlife to look for and learn about. A variety of fun tasks to perform, from picking fruit and berries to making jam and juice.

When my younger brother turned 10, our parents decided that he had to play football. Almost all of the trees were felled. Everything I loved about that place was destroyed, and replaced by one, big, boring, lifeless lawn.

Instead of fun tasks, I was thenceforth assigned the task of mowing the lawn. Which I resented and continue to detest to this day.

<comment><USER5> It took me many years to realize that nearly everything in my grandmother's back yard (except the lawn and porch) was food. There were orange trees, a cherry tree, an avocado tree, garlic, and a raspberry bramble. I loved picking raspberries. There was a pomegranate tree in the front.

A garden is always going to be better than a lawn. A garden of plants that grow faster than trees may be higher-maintenance, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do lawns even factor into the equation when the reality is that industry, farms, etc. own the majority of all water usage? I live in a desert area and hate seeing lawns watered in the middle of the summer but its impact seems trivial.

 _Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the Nation 's consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States.[0]_

Households only make up a small percentage of the total water consumption worldwide[1].

Recommendations to cut foods that require an inordinate amount of water per calorie are probably better served(if you care about freshwater consumption) and it appears the simplest way to reduce this would be to cut out bovine meat.[2]

[0] - [https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices- management/ir...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices- management/irrigation-water-use/)

[1] - [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-in-water- ou...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-in-water-out/)

[2] - [https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product- water-...](https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water- footprint/water-footprint-crop-and-animal-products/)

<comment><USER7> > ... would be to cut out bovine meat.

The somewhat ludicrous figure provided at that link - of 15,415 litres of water per kilogram of meat - is oft' cited by vegetarians and vegans, but doesn't bear scrutiny.

CAFOs are undeniably bad for everyone (the land, the animals, and the consumers) and while they doubtless skew the stats, those grossly artificial environments are clearly not locking up 15 tonnes of water per kilogram of meat.

Something closer to natural - say pastured raised cattle - are using much more reasonable volumes of water, especially at low stocking rates. But the whole 'using water' claim is muddied. The water the animal drinks passes through it and into the ground. Irrigation of the pasture, if performed, can't be thought of as 'lost' water either, as some will go underground, some will be lost as transpiration / evaporation, and some will be stored in the plant to then be consumed by the animal (qv).

> Why do lawns even factor into the equation when the reality is ...

Because lawns are, for most people, for most of the time, pointless wastes of land, water, pesticides, and energy. There are myriad (good) reasons to surrender some lawn and instead grow some of your own food -- TFA just pointed out one of the less obvious ones.

<comment><USER8> > But the whole 'using water' claim is muddied. The water the animal drinks > passes through it and into the ground.

Yes, it's not like the water is destroyed. It may be diverted from directly flowing into a river, sure, and perhaps goes straight back to the atmosphere rather than into the sea via evaporation, exhalation, and transpiration... but it's not _gone_.

<comment><USER9> I don't really see the point of this argument, isn't this true for basically _all_ water usage?

<comment><USER10> Not really. If you put water on plants, most of it evaporates. Example: [https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/sustainable...](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/sustainable-fashion-blog/2014/oct/01/cotton-production-linked-to- images-of-the-dried-up-aral-sea-basin)

<comment><USER7> That still very much fits the 'it's not gone' definition.

Evaporated water _will_ come down again as precipitation.

Your example (cotton) is a truly horrendous crop / textile, but that story sounds like a combination of very poor crop choices for the environment and spectacularly poor resource management.

Also, if you apply water at or beneath the ground/mulch layer, overnight, then your loss to evaporation is very low. Similarly, even suspended drip irrigation (think grapes or other trellis grown plants) versus mist or sprinkler systems.

Lawns, coming back to TFA, are almost exclusively irrigated by sprinklers, and because they're primarily residential (ie. no automated irrigation systems) they're often watered by hand during the day -- so incur a high evaporation loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article seems sloppy.

 _It's just grass with pesticides._

I take care of about two acres of lawns across a few properties for a few decades. I've never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific. I suppose some places must use pesticides, but here in the middle of the US grass just sort of uses sun, water, nitrogen, and some other stuff and grows.

Also the sentence attributing Illinois prairie loss to global warming is hogwash. Global warming didn't turn the prairies into giant farms.

So, grumpy stuff said, I do keep lots of varied native plants too. Grass is just for the area that want to survive occasional foot traffic and be open to show something else.

<comment><USER12> My family never put anything on the, eh, 3 acres of grass I regularly had to mow as a kid.

It wasn't perfect, nobody cared. There were dandelions, there was some clover.

If you can bear to _tolerate_ the fact that your lawn isn't going to look like a putting green, you can do literally nothing but cut it and perhaps water it if your climate requires and be done with it. If there are plants you don't want in your lawn, take them out with your hands or a hoe. If you can't be bothered, then be happy with what you have. If your lawn really can't grow without intense chemical assistance, then maybe don't have a lawn.

<comment><USER13> What's sad is dandelions are neither ugly nor bad for your lawn. They feed bees and the tap roots draw nutrients from deep in the soil, which also benefits the grass.

<comment> core-questions Dandelions are definitely ugly. The problem is that they're weeds: they will grow with abandon and fill up every single possible spot on your lawn, crowding each other out in their rabid attempts to get some delicious sun. Mow them down and you're just acting as an evolutionary selection filter for short, creeping dandelions instead. It only takes a month or two of mowing to end up with a totally different, fully adapted short dandelion population. Leave your lawn fallow for a few months and you'll instead get 6ft tall monsters.

The infection needs to be removed and defended. Entire neighbourhoods need to work together on this; one lazy house is enough to poison the block.

<comment><USER14> This gets tricky. A weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.

We have a corner of garden that we left to nature to get a little wildlife oasis. The nettles and brambles nature added need regular effort to keep controlled, the dandelions are mostly benign in amongst the 6"-foot long grass, they don't dominate like they do on a cricket pitch length lawn.

<comment> core-questions > A weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.

Nah. A weed is an undesired plant, primarily, but also typically one that grows and spreads aggressively and doesn't play nice with the sort of plants one actually wants to cultivate in an area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "Get rid of your lawns," she said. "Lawns are total biological deserts. It's > just grass with pesticides. The way it's grown does not support a lot of > biodiversity."

> Instead, plant native flowers that provide nectar and pollen for > pollinators, Berenbaum said.

I see this a lot recently where I live in Germany, but at the same time I see the opposite as well. Lawn replaced by gravel, often pitch black one. I don't mean that people replace their lawn with parking lots, I mean nice green front gardens turn into minimalist charcoal stone gardens. It has its appeal but not if it is overdone. Is it good for insects? I don't know, certainly not for the flying ones.

<comment><USER16> I see similiar things in Austria. I'm pretty shure it's a mainstream trend that plays into people's urge to take control over nature and remove all rogue elements from their lawns and will be replaced by whatever trend the industry comes up when the market is saturated.

My wife and I feel like we are being looked down on by some of our neighbors because we only maw our lawn twice a year and don't use store bought fertilizer or any pesticides. Before our neighbors gave up on us they would tell us a lot about having to get rid of all stinging nettles (especially after getting children!) and the need for yearly scarifying the grass area (which we are actually trying to turn into a rough pasture) and cutting every bush down to a single twig every year so it wouldn't get out of control.

The good news is, if you talk to those people about your own rationale, they sometimes tend to soften their position or even change it completely and relax themselves a bit. Personally I can't wait the day I can sit outside during spring or summer and not be surrounded by the constant buzz of lawnmowers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Over the years my lawn has shrunk to nothing as my flowerbeds and shrubs expanded. Now my garden is full of hummingbirds most of the year. It makes me so happy to see the little critters buzzing around. I also get a lot of other birds too, funny little migrating things that stay for a few days while passing through. Once they're established, most perennials and shrubs require almost no attention, just some water if it hasn't rained in over a week in the summer. When your plants are happy they crowd out the weeds. I weed once a year at the end of winter and a little here and there during the year.

If you're not sure what to plant, walk around your neighborhood and see what plants are thriving. If you see something growing well in a lot of gardens it will probably do well in yours too.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm covering half my lawn with leaves, woodchips, and hugelkulture. I also have many editable perennials like strawberries and raspberries taking over a large portion of my old hillside lawn.

I'm building systems which hold and sequester large amounts of both water and carbon.

We should start a movement, I have an awesome domain name for the project, if anyone wants to join up, (unturf.com)

I'm using less and less gas each year on the remaining sparse lawn. Next year I plan to use my battery powered weed whacker for the majority of my lawn work (Christmas gift).

My long term goal is no use of gas to maintain my property, and I'm well on track.

For free woodchips, checkout CHIPDROP, it's amazing and growing.

On my 3/4 acre hillside plot I have a thriving baby orchard of 4 years with about 13 apple trees, 6 peach trees, 5 plum trees. My kids love it.

<comment><USER19> I'd like to know more about how you're achieving that. Any pointers or plans to write up what you've done?

<comment><USER18> Follow me on Mastodon for real-time ideas, strategies, processes:

[https://social.unturf.com/@russell](https://social.unturf.com/@russell)

I'll link to long form posts from there, planning a few soon.

Here are a couple basic posts to show examples of whats to come:

[https://social.unturf.com/@russell/102787710856378930](https://social.unturf.com/@russell/102787710856378930)

[https://social.unturf.com/@russell/102787713603718588](https://social.unturf.com/@russell/102787713603718588)

Here you can see me create both a garden path, and a new garden bed with nothing but a spade shovel and woodchips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I grew up in Siberia. When I came here as a kid in the early 90s I was dumbfounded by lawns. Why was everyone cutting all this normal grass all the time??

<comment><USER21> City ordinances require it. My local ordinances specify that it is to minimize health hazards adjacent to public property. Tall grass allows insect and rodent populations to grow, but they are carriers of diseases that can spread to humans.

<comment><USER22> > they are carriers of diseases that can spread to humans.

However, this has nothing to do with why the city's ordinances require a properly maintained lawn.

<comment><USER21> Title 24 Chapter 1 Section 101: Nuisances affecting health.

Subsection B6 states that "The following are hereby declared to be health nuisances affecting public health ... rank growths of vegetation upon private property [which] ... harbors rodents or vermin". This is one of the first 3 reasons listed.

[https://library.municode.com/ok/tulsa/codes/code_of_ordinanc...](https://library.municode.com/ok/tulsa/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TUCOOR_TIT24NU_CH1NUCL_S101NUAFHE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Californians, please plant natives. See laspilitas.com or the Theodore Payne foundation for more info. You can have a beautiful yard that requires zero water(and watering it can often cause harm) in summer yet feeds insects and smells amazing.

<comment><USER17> Natives are also great because when you go out into the woods you can recognize plants from your garden!

Sadly, garden souls are often in much worse shape than what natives need (usually very compacted and lacking in organic matter). Some native plants are native to moist soils and would require more water than a (non-invasive) plant from the Mediterranean, for example. But native plants are tremendous fun and there are ton of resources available to help you find the right plant for the right spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 2017 Freakonomics podcast about the American obsession with lawns: [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession- lawns/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/)

I've been replacing grass with mulched gardens consisting of perennials such as russian sage, black-eyed susans, catmint, various bushes..

</comment><comment><USER25> When I was in China there were certain places where they made jokes about how Americans are so rich they use their lawns just to make their home look pretty (they were growing stuff).

<comment><USER26> That is in fact the purpose of lawns: to show you are rich enough to not surround your house with food gardens. The poor had to plant food anyplace they had legal rights to soil, the rich can plant non-food to show off.

<comment><USER27> The original purpose of lawns was to provide sight lines for castle defense. The forest was cut down, and native ground cover dominated the cleared regions. It was kept short by grazing animals.

It was our old pal Louis and his Versailles palace that introduced the _close- cropped grass lawn_. It was kept short by grazers and gardeners. The poor used their near-house property to grow vegetables and culinary herbs. The rich used it to feed cows or sheep.

It wasn't until the mechanical lawnmower that the grass lawns became entirely useless. Grass is ruminant food, and ruminants are meat.

But we don't keep herds of sheep and cows in the grass-friendly suburbs now, because we don't like stepping in or smelling ruminant poop. And all the pesticides and herbicides would be dangerous for the animals and anyone who ate them.

<comment><USER28> > It wasn't until the mechanical lawnmower that the grass lawns became > entirely useless. Grass is ruminant food, and ruminants are meat.

But ruminants were never a part of the American suburban lawn the way they were in old world villages and wealthy estates. American lawns are almost completely post lawn-mower.

The American suburban lawn is an explicitly visual copy by the post-war working class of the luxuries previously available only to the upper classes of both American and European societies, minus the undesirable aspects like manure.

The new resistance to lawns is occurring in places where the post-war fantasy of pseudo aristocratic life for the working class is breaking down, for either economic or environmental reasons.

<comment><USER27> The mechanical lawn mower was invented in 1830-something, if I'm not mistaken. It would have taken a generation or so to become cheaper, at about 1850-ish for the earliest widely-available, manure-free, close-cropped grass lawns. So I'd put that as the advent of tennis and dedicated golf courses, among other lawn games.

Checking Internet... mechanical lawnmower 1830 exactly, tennis invented between 1859 and 1865, and Oakhurst Links is the oldest 9-hole golf course in America since 1884. Croquet apparently became popular in the 1860s. So that all checks out.

The lawnmower made the lawn. The lawn games and status-associations made them desirable to have.

So the lawn is essentially a long-enduring symbol of upper-class lifestyle. Resistance to grass lawn mono-culture is a symbolic rejection of aspirational wealth. People who live in personal fantasy-lands love their symbology; undermining their symbols can reveal the lies behind them. Those folks that reject the lawn are essentially admitting that they will never get rich. Maybe America will finally stop being a land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and start being one that eats home-grown dandelion salads when not eating the rich.

<comment><USER28> > So the lawn is essentially a long-enduring symbol of upper-class lifestyle.

Of course, when everyone has a perfect lawn is it doesn't serve that symbolic purpose nearly as well (other things take it's place, like exotic travel photos), and it increasingly just becomes a maintenance hassle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm fortunate enough to have recently purchased a 38 acre property in the Midwest, a little hollow with small hills and a spring-fed creek. About 30 acres are woods and the remainder is open, most of it unmowed with lots of native wildflowers and grasses, part of it low and swampy and part high and dry. It was amazing spending the summer there and learning about other butterflies than Monarchs (though we had plenty of them) and birds.

With a bit more TLC over the next few years, I think we'll be in good shape as a little oasis nestled amongst the cornfields and pastures. We fortunately don't have wild parsnip and the garlic mustard is almost gone. Japanese barberry runs rampant in the woods, though. That will take some effort to get rid of.

I thought the mosquitoes would be terrible, but, while present, they seem to have been kept in check by the wind and the birds.

<comment><USER30> Matthias Wandel on youtube has a video of a DIY woodworking project for building a wild parsnip harvester that doesn't require touching the plant, for the purposes of manually eradicating it.

<comment><USER29> Neat! I never knew about poison parsnip until a few years ago when I developed a burn on my arm a few days after flyfishing on a small stream on the 4th of July. It was pretty small all things considered, but very painful and took weeks to heal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Also, don't use bug zappers, which Berenbaum said do not work in killing mosquitoes but do kill hundreds of beneficial species.

This summer I stopped at a petrol station located in some remote forest area. There were literally heaps of dead bugs inside and under the neon panels. Since then I have been wondering how much of the insects are killed simply by the lights that we keep on in the outdoors.

</comment><comment><USER32> Totally agree! Or at least don't use the pesticides! Pluck the weeds by hand. I am baffled when I see people use pesticides around their houses.

Some of my neighbours would even spray a single dandelion growing in between pavement stones with pesticide spray.

</comment><comment><USER33> Native-only plants people are somewhere between DIY garum makers and homebrewers in terms of the fierceness of their ideological warfare online, but in person they are a fun group to socialize with.

</comment><comment><USER34> My parents cut the lawn but otherwise do nothing to it. It abounds with many different insect species: ants, bees, grasshoppers, dragonflies, butterflies, moths

Many different flowers and grasses grow, along with strawberries, clover, etc.

This may depend on climate; they're in eastern canada. And I'm sure there would be arrange things to create an even better bug environment. But the default lawn can be quite good for insects if you just let it grow. I always hated those sterile green lawns people made; the varied lawn we had was much prettier.

<comment><USER35> It's common in the US to treat lawns so that only a single, or small number of, grass species exists. This is a relatively new thing - through the 1960s or so, lawns were as you describe - as long as it was mostly green, it was just mowed - clovers and some other "weeds" were allowed to grow alongside grass. The advent of targeted herbicides and advertising campaigns has led us to growing monoculture lawns.

<comment><USER36> In my neighborhood, there's maybe 1 person out of every 20 who does this. The rest of us mow it regularly and move on with the rest of our lives.

The highly visible actions of a few who have the time to take those actions (or pay for those actions) is not representative of the rest of us.

<comment><USER35> That's not my experience (suburban DC). Overall, I'd guess closer to 1/5 or 1/10 do seasonal treatments. In wealthier subdivisions ($800k+ homes, which isn't unusual here), I'd guess half or more have regular lawn service including chemical treatments. In more middle-class areas, the number of professional treatments drops off considerably, but the residents still do a substantial amount of fertilizing on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd love to see my "progressive" city end setback laws, which require me to keep 15 ft of either grass or dirt in front of my house.

<comment><USER11> Setback laws are usually about not building a structure too close to a lot line. On the front, a minimal setback keeps the street from becoming a canyon. Larger setbacks are more of a look and feel thing for a neighborhood. Front setbacks may also be governed by adjacent houses to encourage all the fronts to line up. It's tidier that way.

<comment><USER38> setbacks are about reducing FAR so people need to buy a lot more land than they need to build a home to live in. It helps keep property values high and land as a scarce resource.

<comment><USER39> That is a consequence, not the intention.

I don't see how you can avoid street canyons otherwise.

<comment><USER40> Don't you have to seek municipality approval for structures? At least where I'm from we have to seek approval from the municipality to build anything bigger than a certain size on our own land. Anything that is close to a public street or neighbor also have to be approved.

<comment><USER41> When you say seek approval, in the US at least there is 'by right' zoning. Meaning that anything can be built by right as long as it follows certain rules. The approval is generally not an approval so much as a check to make sure it is following the rules. Anything not in the rules usually has to go through a special approval of a planning commission and neighbors may need to ok it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Get rid of HOA's first :/

<comment><USER30> Or if you want to be a bit of a rebel, make seed bombs: seeds mixed in with spheres of fertilizer, dried, and then lobbed onto the sides of roads (safely, at a low speed, and not to be destructive to personal property); you can litter with native species to help bee populations.

<comment><USER43> I have sued someone for ruining some very expensive landscaping in a similar manner for the costs to remediate. It was over 60k. Sucks for them. Disrespect property at your own peril.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Some people live where the lawn will take over given half a chance. Not everyone lives in Phoenix or whatever. Nor is pesticide use required to have a lawn.

</comment><comment><USER45> If you can't get rid of the lawn due to HOA regs or local laws try clover. Most folks won't notice the difference and bees love it. One my old elementary schools still has a huge clover field and the bees still come around for the flowers during Spring.

<comment><USER46> This is the viable alternative, having similar aesthetics to a traditional lawn. However there's still a fair amount of push-back. I just bought a house and am planning a clover lawn this spring, and discussing it with extended family over the holidays was met with a large amount of skepticism.

<comment><USER45> That's sad. Clover is easier to manage and it's actually softer on your feet. So if you have kids who want to play outside and forget their shoes they won't get scratched up like you would on some more durable grass species.

<comment><USER46> I'm hoping it's less itch-provoking as well. I can't lie on grass without irritating my skin like crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There are few greater joys than to be perched under ones favourite pear tree, across from the cherry, having just had salad from the beds for lunch, a food coma settling in, and in the sunshine the bees and bugs flitter and float, while the garden grows green and green.

A lawn is a terrible waste of land. In most such plots, let food gardens grow. The work is worth it.

</comment><comment><USER48> It feels like I picked the worst of both worlds. I don't use pesticides and remove weeds by hand. I will admit that I like quiet appeal of the lawn despite the amount of work I have to put into it.

Personally, I think people don't appreciate how little manual labor can help you focus and keep things in perspective.

</comment><comment><USER49> Well it's been 5 years of no grass, it is the worse. The weeds are everywhere I have to use roundup to kill them or they will take over the yard. There is just too many to uproot. If you live in an area where people live close by and use leaf blowers to clean, keep the grass and your sanity.

<comment><USER43> You are missing the point. Grow other things or something will grow. Using roundup is just making the problem worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The best "lawn" I ever had was where I just let the local flora have its way. Best looking lawn in the neighborhood. I mowed it once a year.

I keep trying it in Seattle, but the invasive blackberry bushes and scotch broom keep throttling the native stuff.

<comment><USER23> Lots of native yards need protection from invasives. Preemergent herbicides are a great help. Initial clearing with something like Roundup is also not always discouraged because it keeps the soil from being disturbed and resowing invasive seeds. Having problematic invasives is actually more reason to have a native yard where you can take responsibility for supporting native wildlife.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> In Germany we have "Kleingärten / Schrebergärten" in most cities that mostly belong to non-profit associations. They give people the chance to lease a small garden - 400 m² on average - and grow their own fruit and vegetables, and of course spend time there in the summer (most gardens have small houses where people can stay overnight as well). More than 5 million people use such gardens. The statutes of most associations require people to grow fruit or vegetables on a given percentage - usually 30 % - of the lot, and to have a certain number of trees on the lot as well.

<comment><USER52> In NL we call them 'volkstuinen' or people gardens. For people in cities who don't have outside space, such as apartments.

[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstuin](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstuin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is neat - I live in Champaign near the University where she works. Every year for the past decade or so I visit the annual native plant sale that a local preservation group puts on. I've been slowly building up a patch of native prairie plants in my back yard that I hope to expand more and more. We do maintain the lawn in our front just to keep it looking nice but we don't use any chemicals (bad for kids too!), but we kind of let the back yard do its own thing for the most part.

</comment><comment><USER54> Spring to spring I had set off to grow edible stuff but it's been such a hassle with the need for irrigation and weeding and pesticides and then it failed to produce anything substantial. Until I met with deep mulch gardening. The method I follow requires years to build up a healthy, thick layer of soil, but that's fine. Hardly any weeding and no watering, no pesticides, just collect and spread leaf litter others dumped nearby, make it 60 cm thick in autumn, enjoy winter, plant during spring and it just works. I plan to convert more lawn.

</comment><comment><USER55> We have replaced large parts of our lawn with Carpobrotus edulis or sour fig which is drought resistant. It's great for insect life as well. Planting indigenous replacement lawns helps indigenous life

</comment><comment><USER56> Are scientists often in a position to provide advice with holistic value? I'm usually quite skeptical of advice like this when it comes from someone who is laser focused on a specific domain.

<comment><USER57> lawn care invites exorbitant water consumption, pesticide use, creates smog from lawn mowing, and induces a mono-culture ecosystem.

I for one would like drought tolerant (in CA anyway) native plant species to fill our lawn spaces...especially the ones that get rarely used.

<comment><USER58> Every drought-tolerant landscape I've seen looks passable for about two months and becomes an overgrown mess after that. I know we need to change, but if we can't come up with a yard people will maintain, lawns and giant driveways with a soul patch will keep winning.

<comment><USER59> i've seen some really good ones in my neighborhood.

it does require maintenance but choosing the right plants can do wonders

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> When I was giving serious thought to moving to Vegas, one thing I thought was super cool was that nobody had lawns, just patches of gravel, some scraggly desert underbrush, and maybe a palm tree or two.

I love single-family houses but hate lawns, so that was one thing I was looking forward to about moving. Alas, it never happened. The main reason I was expecting to have to move evaporated, and I love my city enough that I don't want to move unless I have to, even despite lawns.

</comment><comment><USER61> Rob Greenfield's videos about living for a year in Orlando eating only food he grew himself or foraged from the wild are amazing stories of abundance [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHrhas5pE0W4rtw6yAsxi...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHrhas5pE0W4rtw6yAsxiB8gP66EDe4IA).

He found a few people to let him grow plants in their yards and ended up with abundance, diversity, and joy.

<comment><USER18> I want to take on this journey at some point, I live in a very different climate to him so I decided not to watch his series because it really won't be beneficial to me and my progress (unless I move to Florida).

I live in Connecticut, and I think at least for my first attempt, I will try a week, and then a month of eating and foraging only from my land and neighborhood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> A fairly large chunk of the border areas around my lawn are left wild with trees and tall grasses and etc.

But otherwise I have kids and such a while they love to climb through the wild areas, they also love playing on the open lawn too.... I'm not ready to take that from them even if it was feasible.

If I were in the southwest where lawns were more or less optional then yeah, but not where I am now.

<comment><USER63> Nature is just starting to tell us that our way of life isn't sustainable.

There are more sustainable ways to live, we just have to be open to discussing them. You want a lawn - how often do your children play on it? An hour per day? That means your lawn is unused 96% of the time.

How about we redesign our living spaces so we have one large common lawn that many residences can share. Kids will be more encouraged to play outside and play together. And we can put markets within walking distance of these residences, and movie theaters and other stores.

Suddenly our children are more social, we're getting more exercise, driving less, not having insect-killing monospecies lawns that aren't used 96% of the time and many other benefits.

There are solutions to this but if we put our fingers in our ears and say we want things how they've been for the last 60 years then we are no smarter than the cyanobacteria that converted so much carbon dioxide to oxygen that they suffocated themselves 2.5 billion years ago.

<comment><USER62> While I appreciate your general design point.

My neighborhood probabbly isn't going to be reconfigured anytime soon... so that really didn't change anything.

<comment><USER63> _My neighborhood probabbly isn 't going to be reconfigured anytime soon_

The problem is new neighborhoods are being put up literally every day across the country and we are cookie-cutting them out the same way we've done since the 1940s because everyone has the same attitude you've exhibited of "Don't care, want my lawn."

<comment><USER62> >everyone has the same attitude you've exhibited of "Don't care, want my lawn."

I mean here I am reading the article and obviously interested, I talk about the practical impact of what it would mean to change existing lawns, the fact that I leave a bunch of my lawn wild, and you basically ignore that and boil down my point of view into something it isn't.

It's not surprising we have such a divides about such issues.

<comment><USER64> Saying "I don't want to take away the lawn from my kids" is saying "Don't care, want my lawn."

<comment><USER62> Call me crazy but I think those are very different statements. And that's just leaving out everything else I wrote about how much I care.

<comment><USER64> They are different statements that convey the same message.

It strikes me as curious to say your children running around your lawn is a reason to keep it, but you must realize your children will experience a vastly different quality of life from climate change and/or the loss of pollinators.

<comment><USER62> Not everything about humanity is so absolute.

I like giving my kids a place to play in the yard. I can express that desire and still be concerned about climate change / do things about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The Rifftrax short "Goodbye, Weeds" gives one perspective on how Americans thought about their lawns circa the 1950's: [0]

[0] [https://www.rifftrax.com/goodbye-weeds](https://www.rifftrax.com/goodbye- weeds)

</comment><comment><USER66> I can't get rid of my lawn. I would be sued by my HOA and fined and eventually evicted.

<comment><USER67> You could try finding like minded people in your HOA and then bring suggestions & alternatives (zero-spacing, clover, etc.) to the HOA meetings. Of course many HOAs are controlled & populated by retired boomers so YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Are there environmentally friendly alternatives to the traditional grass lawn if one uses their lawn for sports, BBQ, and play? Maybe just allowing grass to grow more naturally rather than using pesticides and removing weeds?

<comment><USER69> For several years, I fed my lawn an organic diet (corn gluten meal in the spring, which serves as a mild pre-emergent, then mixes of cracked corn, alfalfa, soybean meal, often in the form of horse and rabbit feed).

Healthy grass, cut somewhat higher than typical will outcompete most weeds. The only weed I wasn't able to control effectively enough this way were grassy weeds (poa trivialis and poa annua). Triv patches had to be mechanically removed and annua needed late summer chemical pre-emergent (CGM isn't effective enough there). Once those were dramatically reduced (from the "yard" I inherited when we bought the place), the organic system was effective in keeping a >95th percentile lawn. That lawn was more resilient and beautiful than any of the chemically fertilized lawns (whether high or low input) I've maintained. In addition, we had more wild rabbits than I've ever seen, providing additional entertainment for the kids.

The big issue with the organic lawn feeding is that it's quite bulky. No more 15 pound bag of sulfur coated urea that would do two fertilizer applications on my small city lawn. Instead, it was 30-50# bags of organic material that had to bought at Agway or Tractor Supply (necessitating a car trip) and couldn't reasonably be stored for a long time due to bulk and being organic (subject to rotting and rodent infestation). It's also more expensive than the chemical feeding, but still not prohibitive.

<comment><USER70> PC asked for environmentally friendly alternatives to a grass lawn. Your suggestion is neither an alternative to a grass lawn, nor environmentally friendly. (An order of magnitude more pesticides, fertilizer and water are used to grow the animal feed that you are using as fertilizer than you need to would put on your lawn.

At an industrial scale, the land used to grow that "fertilizer" could be put to better use growing actual food!

(Quibble: unless the animal feed is itself certified organic, it is not an "organic diet" for your lawn in the recognised sense of the word.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I need to have a lawn to separate the forest from the house. If you don't the forest encroaches and then you eventually have trees that fall on the house (think new england ice storms). I also need to cut back the trees to make sure there is enough light for the solar panels. I don't need a super green lawn but I need something that gets mowed.

<comment><USER72> You don't have to just let the entire forest in to follow the advice in the article. There are a lot of low ground cover type plants that would do wonders for the insect population and you could still cut back any actual trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Pestidicides? People where I live use little to no pesticides on their lawns.

</comment><comment><USER74> The best option would be to let the native grasses and vegetation grow.

</comment><comment><USER75> I don't use pesticides. I don't use bug zapper either

</comment><comment><USER76> Where I live, getting rid of your lawn is a fantastic way to get Lyme disease. No thanks, been there, done that.

<comment><USER77> Ticks don't live on gravel

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> And don't clean fallen leaves in the autumn...

<comment><USER72> > Another tip: Leave leaf litter in place. The dead plant material is an > important part of healthy soil and offers protection for insects during the > winter, Berenbaum said.

They say exactly that in the article.

<comment><USER78> indeed, missed that sentence on first reading...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Climate changes, get over it.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I convince my employer to let me work from home? - <AUTHOR> I am 8 months post Autologous stem-cell transplant for treatment of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and as such, I am still immuno-suppressed. I am already extremely concerned about contracting COVID-19 since I am required to visit the hospital once every three weeks for post transplant treatment, and I know they're already under-equipped to handle the situation. I am a developer who could work from home, if my employer allowed. Unfortunately, my employer has taken the "wait until it's an issue" stance, and expects that employees use their PTO to cover any days we take off. Their current work from home stance is "it is not currently possible to allow all employees to work remotely" meaning that no employees can work remotely.<p>For the health and safety of myself and those around me, how can I convince my employer to allow me to work from home? <comment><USER2> Hey, (tongue in cheek here...)

Maybe if there were some way to draw up a some type of contract/agreement between you and the employer, covering the possibility that if your vector of infection (if it happens) was caused by going to work (commuting with people, being at the location, etc.), when a suitable alternative was available (remote working), they take full responsibility in the event of you contracting the illness. (COVID-19)

And being responsible for placing you (someone immuno-compromised) into an environment where the possibility of infection may be arguably higher than working from home. They are responsible, maybe to the largest extent, of you getting sick and dying.

Unfortunately, if the worst case happens and you contract the disease, and die, perhaps someone related to you might gain some type of financial benefit. But again, you're still dead.

Again this is tongue in cheek, so what do I know. Like most of us, you probably signed away all rights to sue and therefore anything like this is moot.

The typical American POV is that you should have thought about something like this a long time ago and had insurance that covers the possibility of you getting sick and dying. It's not your employer's responsibility to keep you healthy, or necessarily to provide you a space to work that's safe from these types of threats. Ultimately it's all your fault.

You're welcome.

So the only solace you can take would unfortunately be very dark. As in, "If I get it, I'm sure as fuck gonna make sure you all get it....". Yeah, that sucks and really takes that whole team morale down a bit. As well as scares the fark outta me when I think about some of the people I work with (a lot) that might be, just that pissed.

Welcome to America!

<comment><AUTHOR> The state I work in is an "at will" state, so you're right that I'm at the whim of my employer. I also need health insurance to cover my ongoing treatment, and sometimes it feels like my employer knows that as well. Why would they worry about how they treat me when they know that there's no way I can just leave?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Letting you work from home in this situation might be considered a "reasonable accommodation" under the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). The ADA applies to employers with 15 or more employees.

Here's some information about the ADA: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990)

There may also be applicable laws in your state. Just because an employee is at-will doesn't mean that they have no legal protections.

You may want to contact a lawyer specializing in employment law for more information on what your legal rights are in this situation.

I hope everything goes well for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> From my understanding of the ADA, my employer is only required to make some "reasonable accommodations" available, and not tailor them to my specific needs. As stated in the link provided, "An employer is not required to provide an accommodation that would involve undue hardship (significant difficulty or expense)." I would think it would be possible for my employer to argue that setting up remote work would involve undue hardship...

<comment><USER3> How could an accommodation be "reasonable" if it didn't actually address your specific needs?

A lawyer would be able to give you a more definitive answer as to what constitutes "undue hardship" and what your employer's obligations would be.

> Their current work from home stance is "it is not currently possible to > allow all employees to work remotely"

That it's impossible for "all employees" is irrelevant. You'd only be asking for an accommodation for a single employee, yourself, not a change in their overall policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start coughing loudly at your desk.

<comment><AUTHOR> This might get me sent home, but this doesn't help me continue to make money while out of work. The problem is I am not in a position where I can take two weeks of unpaid leave. We are already only given 12 days of PTO, and I have to use those to cover the days I go to treatment.</comment></comment>


Twitter's new reply-limiting feature is already changing how we talk - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/23/21266969/twitter-new-reply-limiting-feature-how-using-changing-talk <comment><USER2> So they restrict your speech even more? Why would you want to support a platform that does this?</comment>


Incentives and Legends  - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/02/01/incentives-and-legends/ <comment><USER2> Dollar bills seems a little bit cheesy. Twenties would have made a big enough pile.

<comment><USER3> Nah, the whole point was to have such an overwhelming physical representation of the reward. A check for $15K is sliced by taxes and allocated to something mentally with little physical stimulus. It's only $750 twenties which would be about the size of a hardback book. In ones, it's literally a briefcase full of money, so even though the amount is the same, you're like a guy in a movie, not just someone who's going to pay off a credit card.

<comment><USER2> It just seems to me that the spectacle of it would be undermined by the annoying amount of time spent picking stray bills off the floor.</comment></comment></comment>


Channels are Actors - <AUTHOR> I highly recommend Simon Fowler's ECOOP 2017 lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpbkIjjoMRk
However, channels are best understood as Actors with put and get messages so that aChannel.put[x] puts x in aChannel and aChannel.get[ ] gets from aChannel.  A channel of type T has the following interface:
   Interface Channel<T>
      put[T] -> Void,
      get[ ] -> T
Actors can be categorically automatized, which means that up to a unique isomorphism, there is just one model that satisfies the axioms.  In this way, Actors can be much more precisely defined in a general way than can be done using an extended lambda calculus as in Fowler's lecture.
Furthermore, a common misunderstanding is that an an Actor must have a mailbox, message queue, or event queue. There would be an infinite regress if any of these were required because since everything is an Actor, each of these would itself need a mailbox, message queue, or event queue.  Instead, an Actor (e.g. a ReadersWriters scheduler) performs internal queuing when required.  See https://www.amazon.com/Inconsistency-Robustness-Studies-Logi...
To get the latest, see my upcoming Code Mesh Keynote: https://plus.google.com/+CarlHewitt-StandardIoT/posts/BXSZ7Y... <comment><USER2> A channel can behave like an actor but they are not the same thing. An actor is a living entity. A channel is a transit mechanism.

What is the purpose of this post? To argue the academic definition of channels and actors? To spark a discussion on their uses and benefits?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fowler's talk addressed issues arising from "mixing metaphors" by having both channels and Actors in our programming languages.

The point of this post is to point out that channels are best understood as Actors that take put and get messages thereby achieving a unification in our programming languages and conceptual framework.

Of course, a channel can be conceived as a "living entity" and an Actor can be used as a "transit mechanism."

<comment><USER3> Do you want to abolish the protagonist role of the channel abstraction like in CSP based languages and certain message brokers?

We can't have issues with channels if we're all actors and don't impedance mismatch the mixture when building our systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Message passing communication is more fundamental than channel commutation.

However, lists {T*] of type T are very important; especially when they are used with Futures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> PS. The interface for ReadersWriter is

Interface ReadersWriter read[QueryRequest] -> QueryResponse, write[WriteRequest] -> Void

A ReadersWriter scheduler for a database allows multiple read messages to be concurrently operating in the database but a write excludes all others.

</comment><comment><USER3> How this view on channels relate with information theory? can we think of them as an actor and its capacity a property of the physical modeling represented by that actor: floppy disk, cd, dvd, lan, wan, river, lake, ocean?

<comment><AUTHOR> The relationship with theories of information is explained in Strong Types for Direct Logic here: [https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-01566393](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01566393)

<comment><USER3> Thanks professor, looking forward to join your keynote at code mesh.

[https://codesync.global/speaker/carl- hewitt/](https://codesync.global/speaker/carl-hewitt/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I assume you're referring to the Actor model actors not the constrained implementations in popular frameworks, am I right?

<comment><AUTHOR> In almost all current frameworks. every Actor has a mailbox. It makes very good sense for an Actor programming language not to have mailboxes built into every Actor because it can make programs less robust, more difficult to understand, and more difficult to optimize. Instead, when desired an Actor can do its own internal queuing as necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This appears to be a post about a mystery programming language.

<comment><USER3> Bigger than that is a concurrent model of computation!

<comment><AUTHOR> The Actor Model covers all digital computations. Actor programming languages can express all computations in the Actor Model.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Save money and enter into a free monthly lottery - <AUTHOR> http://www.monilo.io <comment><AUTHOR> We're building our waitlist, beta coming in the next month. Happy to answer any questions and I'd love feedback.</comment>


Developing Backbone.js Applications - <AUTHOR> http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone-fundamentals/ <comment><USER2> I got the early release of this book on Oreily Safari and I have a rather low opinion of this book. I was developing a Backbone.js app wanted to use this book to provide insights but this book was surprisingly completely unhelpful. I was ( and I guess I still am )struggling with rendering components , item views and list views and managing events/models and struggling with router etc. I am not the only programmer with these issues; there are plenty of non- trivial question about backbone.js on Stackoverflow. This book has little to help one understand the internals of backbone.js or how and where to apply underscore.js . For some reason this book veers off into node.js development as if every one using backbone.js is going to wrote a node.js back-end server app. Thankfully enough, there are several outstanding tutorials on the web on backbone.js and the underscore.js libraries as very well documented and the demo app is also very illustrative. I purchased this book on OReilly Safari to support the authors but the book is a complete disappointment.

<comment><USER3> Check out recipes with backbone. I was in a similar place(past to do apps, but not ready for anything substantial) and I found it to be a great help. Truth be told, there is not a lot of good literature on intermediate backbone development and I think that's really hampering its adoption.

<comment><USER4> Erik, links please!

Also, have you published that Backbone tutorial you were working on yet?

<comment><USER5> This? <http://recipeswithbackbone.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried Backbone and am now looking at Angular... but part of me is starting to think "is this such a good idea?". All the authentication stuff, and validation, and so on has to be done server side anyway, and perhaps replicated in the JS framework. Also, keeping models in sync looks like it might be easy to screw up.

<comment><USER7> I suggest you try it out, I think your lines of code will greatly decrease. The biggest reason I prefer to program in Angular over Backbone is that I simply don't have to write rendering logic code because of data-binding. There's no "render" function, no jQuery DOM manipulation for common tasks, because all rendering behavior is declared in the HTML. Unless you're doing something non-trivial, in which case you should write a custom directive. (For those unfamiliar with Angular, a directive is a declaration of a new HTML tag or attribute with custom behavior which can be reused throughout your app)

I've got to admit that I've never worked on a substantial Backbone app, but many of the issues I see people having with Backbone (regarding rendering item and list views, programmatically binding events, etc..) are simply non- existent in Angular.

<comment><USER8> We investigated using Backbone vs. Angular for a project and went with Angular and could not be happier. It's not just the two-way data binding, which you can get with frameworks like Knockout.js and Ember.js; it's the dependency injection and testability of the code. Never before have we had this good of test coverage in a pure javascript app, and most of it is unit tests which is very impressive considering how concerned javascript usually is with manipulating the DOM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Surprised this hadn't been posted yet. I've been sharing this with people for a while now and I just assumed it had already been submitted.

Chaplin (despite being CoffeeScript) is also a good framework to check out since it demonstrates several good practices for large Backbone.js apps

</comment><comment><USER10> Great work! The only thing is that this needs to get updated based on the changes of the new 0.9.9 release. Specifically you do not need to create a custom dispose function, remove now will remove listeners bound to the view.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anybody wants to look to another one (not launched, still a beta version, but created with large projects in mind, speed of development and long time maintenance in mind): <https://github.com/salboaie/shape> ?

I will greatly appreciate your feedback.

<comment><USER12> I would love to hear if you tried Backbone before your build your framework. If so, what are your reasons for making it.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but what I was looking was a very different beast: Bindings with properties chains, declarative style when possible, typed models with auto- computed expressions, reusable components (controllers/presenters), separation of views from controllers (as little code as possible in views - in shape we have only html with bindings). Our background was Flex with a MVVM framework we created. We tried to replicate it in HTML5 .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the jury out on best practices for SEO when using frameworks like Backbone.js to build "one page" sites?

<comment><USER14> I'd always assumed that the product you'd build with one of these frameworks would live behind some sort of authentication such that SEO wouldn't really be an issue because the bots wouldn't see it. Your marketing site would be driven by a separate CMS.

<comment><USER15> definetly, an user admin or a L.O.B app dont need to be SEO friendly , if you want SEO and you are doing single page app f you are doing it wrong.

<comment><USER16> What about situations where you need to be SEO friendly, but you have enough in-page interaction and reused components that mere jQuery starts to become unwieldy?

<comment><USER17> Nothing prevents you from using backbone in static pages. Also, Google's spiders can crawl javascript-heavy apps [1], but I'm not sure that's a future- proof approach. If your interactive content is that important for SEO, it should already be in the HTML, with the interaction layer on top.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax- crawling/docs/...](https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax- crawling/docs/getting-started)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This book has been a big help while learning backbone. It would be helpful to add some details around how ajax requests created by the framework. It was nice when I realized I could use models as ajax request making utilities.

</comment><comment><USER19> That guy is my web dev hero.

</comment><comment><USER20> I found this to be a good reference when I was looking for something a bit more in-depth than the typical Todo examples.

</comment><comment><USER15> peepcode and nettuts+ videos on backbone are great too. This book is definetly interesting and worth buying for beginner that want non trivial exemples and advices on how to work with client apps in general.</comment>


WebAssembly is more than the web - <AUTHOR> http://words.steveklabnik.com/webassembly-is-more-than-just-the-web <comment><USER2> I'm also excited about this aspect of WebAssembly, but interoperability will hard without a well-defined ABI. There are only four types in wasm: int32, int64, float32, and float64. Anything other than that needs to be encoded somehow, either as multiple values or in memory.

For example, say you want to pass a 16-byte struct as an argument: how do you do it? Do you store the struct in memory and pass an int32 pointer to its start address? Or an int64 pointer? Maybe you encode it as two int64s? Once you've made a choice, good luck calling functions generated by a compiler that made a different one!

Another problem (in the web context) is blocking--Emscripten runs into this one. You can't suspend WebAssembly execution in the middle of calling out to an imported function. If a WebAssembly program wants to read keypresses interactively, it can't use a blocking function like read(). You have to pass the keypresses in at the outer level--or reimplement the call stack yourself like Go did ([https://docs.google.com/document/d/131vjr4DH6JFnb- blm_uRdaC0...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/131vjr4DH6JFnb- blm_uRdaC0_Nv3OUwjEY5qVCxCup4/preview)).

In general, WebAssembly code today is very tied to the JavaScript code that manages its interaction with the outside world. You can't just write a WebAssembly program that uses OpenGL. You also need to write the JavaScript that turns those calls into WebGL calls. I don't think this is a fundamental problem--we just haven't seen standards develop yet. As platforms start to define their API directly in terms of WebAssembly, without a JavaScript layer, we may see more of a "standard ABI" develop. Until then, it's hard to know what kind of APIs to target or support as an application or compiler writer.

<comment><USER3> > For example, say you want to pass a 16-byte struct as an argument: how do > you do it? Do you store the struct in memory and pass an int32 pointer to > its start address? Or an int64 pointer? Maybe you encode it as two int64s? > Once you've made a choice, good luck calling functions generated by a > compiler that made a different one!

Sounds like every architecture ever? There's an architecture specification and then there's an ABI. It's common to only support some small number of sizes, x86 is a bit the odd one out these days.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but there's no standard ABI for WebAssembly yet. I'm basically just saying we need an ABI before we can target it as a platform apart from the web.

<comment> white-flame It's not really a standalone platform, though. It's a sandbox utility to contain high-speed or highly customized computation, that can be plugged into any other platform. By design, it doesn't seem intended to be limited to a single higher-level (well, higher than assembly language) ABI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At the risk of sounding like an old grumpy guy[0], isn't this kind of what Java[0] set out to achieve some 20 years ago?

I am in no position to compare the two by any metric other than age. But I _am_ old enough to appreciate how such ideas tend return every couple of decades.

Is this an IT thing, or is this phenomenon known in other areas, too?

[0] I am not even that old, and I do my best to not be grumpy.

[1] Yes, yes, Smalltalk, too. But Java - AFAIK - was the first language that aimed for platform-independent bytecode + network delivery of code (Applets, Webstart).

<comment> white-flame Java's intent was "write _Java_ code once, run anywhere". The JVM exposes a strict Java-centric view of what it can run, and it can be difficult to run other language environments on top of the JVM reasonably.

Webasm is basically "write _any_ code once, run anywhere". It models a very low-level CPU-like environment that the code fully controls at the byte level, so even runtime language VMs can run in such a model without harsh slowdowns. While this literally offers fewer features than the JVM, it doesn't restrict which features the final runtime can implement.

This of course is all based on the assumption that you have a CPU-level environment that already bootstraps what you need (like C-based garbage collectors running underneath your dynamic language); or that you're running low-level, assembly-style code for speed reasons.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, as a side effect of it supporting only one memory model, it means that the host code only has a giant memory bag to work with, meaning it needs to reconstruct objects from a giant heap. Currently, anything involving more complex host interaction (say, handles to kernel objects like files) is punted on to either the host-bindings proposal (which has a number of issues and basically was agreed was not a way forward) or the GC proposal (which has even more issues).

The current plan for the GC proposal is to allow skipping having memory heaps at all and talk about things in terms of an object graph and types. See comments here: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/32](https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/32)

The important part of a runtime to me is the object model, and wasm basically punted on one for now.

<comment> white-flame Yes, that's what a CPU-level model with byte-level access means, and is how all code running on your computer has its basis. Whatever high level constructs you want are built on top of your asm-level runtime. This is as- designed, as is the only reasonable way to allow different language paradigms to run on top of it. It's also heavily implied by the name.

It does have a notion of function imports & exports, so in the same way it allows you to do what you want, without specifying what you're going to do. For untrusted code, like in a browser, the environment can choose only to extend limited access. For trusted code, the environment can give access to more OS-level functionality. By webasm not specifying _what_ functions to bind, but giving the _ability_ to bind functions, it remains flexible and appropriate for wildly varying deployments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is technically web, but not in the way you might think. We (Cloudflare) are working on providing WASM support in our Workers [1] product that lets you run code in our 155 data centers around the world.

WASM is great because we can run it in V8 isolates which are much lighter weight than containers or full VMs.

[1] [https://cloudflareworkers.com](https://cloudflareworkers.com)

<comment><USER7> What are the security implications here?

i.e. the Chrome team, post-Spectre, are assuming that any value in a process' memory is readable by any code executing within that process.

<comment><USER8> V8's developer guide[1] recommends running un-trusted code in separate processes. So each worker job would need to fork.

[1] [https://github.com/v8/v8/wiki/Untrusted-code- mitigations#san...](https://github.com/v8/v8/wiki/Untrusted-code- mitigations#sandbox-untrusted-execution-in-a-separate-process)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it would be neat if WebAssembly were embedded in other languages, like it is in JavaScript now. For example, suppose Python had a WebAssembly engine. I bet that could replace a lot of C extensions, and it would be as portable/universal as pure Python code, so no need for C compilers, OS- specific binary packages, etc.

<comment> white-flame While this would supplant "C for speed" libraries, it wouldn't supplant "C for OS access" libraries. At some point, system code needs to call the OS.

<comment><USER10> Not all OS were or are written in C.

<comment> white-flame Sure, replace "C" with whatever OS language is appropriate. The situation is still the same: wasm doesn't talk directly to the host interfaces, regardless of it being low-level. You'd still need another FFI layer somewhere to talk to those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> WebAssembly isn't _just_ a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal.

"Write-once, run everywhere without paying someone for the privilege"

I think the term's overused, but this could actually be a "game changer".

<comment><USER12> > WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to > target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run > software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to > ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal.

Apple still control what API you can use in their mobile browser, and it's not like they are at the forefront when it comes to implementing Web API today, especially when they also forbid any alternative browser on IOS. Ultimately WebAssembly is limited by the API it has access to in the context of the browser (and the resources that are granted by the browser). All the promises of the "web as an app platform" have not been fulfilled yet.

IMHO WebAssembly will play a bigger role on the server, with nodejs for instance as it will allow portable native code distribution.

<comment><USER11> Sure, that's certainly a factor. But there's a large class of applications that can get by with the API that is available.

I'm not suggesting it's a way to build mobile applications without paying Apple. I'm suggesting it will be possible to deliver a product to (nearly) all platforms using 1) a single codebase and 2) bypassing walled gardens.

Personally I won't build products for an App Store anymore. They're too restrictive, expensive and time consuming to be worth it. But being able to, say, deliver a desktop product (either via the web or packed in something like Electron) and _also_ deliver nearly the same experience to an iPad Pro would be huge.

<comment><USER10> If you can assure the same security quality, then by all means.

Meanwhile I will keep my sandboxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the first time someone explained the value proposition of WebAssembly and I understood it. Now I'm actually intrigued.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As one of the co-founders of WASM, I can say, yes, the layering was a deliberate design decision for exactly the reasons laid out in the article.

Glad this is penetrating the wider consciousness.

Thanks for writing this, Steve!

<comment><AUTHOR> <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obligatory mention of this tongue in the cheek and visionary look presentation "The Birth & Death of JavaScript": [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

This is basically what is happening with wasm and it's happening much faster Gary Bernhardt was anticipating in that presentation.

IMHO wasm finally displaces javascript as the only practical language to run stuff in a browser. Frontend stuff happens in javascript primarily because browsers cannot run anything else now that plugins have been killed off. Wasm changes that.

At the same time a lot of desktop apps are in fact javascript apps running on top of electron/chrome. Anything like that can also run wasm.

Finally people have been porting vms to javascript for pretty much as long as wasm and its predecessors have been around. So booting a vm that runs windows 95 or linux in a browser is not very practical but was shown to work years ago. This is what probably inspired the presentation above.

I've actually been pondering doing some frontend stuff in kotlin in or rust. I'm a backend guy and I just never had any patience for javascript. I find working in it to be an exercise in frustration. But I actually did some UI work in Java back in the day (swing and applets). Also there's a huge potential for stuff like webgl, webvr, etc. to be driven using languages more suitable to building performance critical software if they can target wasm. I think wasm is going to be a key enabler for that.

Most of the stuff relevant for this has been rolling out in the last few years. E.g. webgl is now supported in most browsers. Webvr is getting there as well. Wasm support has been rolled out as well. Unity has been targeting html5 + wasm for a while now. And one of the first things that Mozilla demoed years ago with wasm was Unreal running in a browser.

I would not be surprised to see some of this stuff showing up in OSes like fuchsia (if and when that ships) or chrome os.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was lucky enough to see that talk live, and it's stuck with me. It's certainly where a big part of my enthusiasm for WebAssembly comes from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you have to compile a high level language L to wasm you could follow many paths, for example L to C, C to wasm, or L to Lisp, Lisp to wasm. I should suggest to create a graph in which vertices are languages and edges are labeled with the efficiency of translation. This way one could use graph theory to select the best path. This is only the ground idea. At a second step one could study what features of languages are main ingredients of that efficiency and design a middleware high level language M for the translation to wasm: L -> M -> wasm. Or weight the translation using a vector of features (concurrency, speed, bugs reports, etc) and select the path that gives the best result. L -> M1 -> M2 -> ... wasm,where Mi are selected by the specific features used for a concrete program in L. All computations of efficiency should discount or take into account the use of specific libraries. For instance, numpy with python makes the speed difference between c and python smaller.

</comment><comment><USER17> One thing I am concerned about is startup performance. On my (slow) Chromebook, some of my multi-megabyte WASM files take 10 seconds to compile. Seems we need either faster CPU cores, faster code generation, or some kind of staged JIT compile -- though I guess the latter could be accomplished today with sufficiently clever tooling.

<comment><USER18> Chrome Canary contains Liftoff, which is about 8x faster on my machine for initial compilation of wasm. I'm assuming it'll be in Chrome 69.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. X64 and ia32 support vor Liftoff will be in 69.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _So, WebAssembly itself, the core, is completely independent of the web. The > web is a particular environment that Wasm is embedded in, but not actually > required to use wasm. Other embedding APIs can be created, with their own > interfaces, to do various things._

Does that mean one could e.g. create Node.js modules in Wasm, like we also have the C++ modules? That could give a nice boost to certain kinds of code like text processing and math (e.g. a big integer or matrix algebra library).

(Perhaps this is already a thing).

<comment><USER21> It's already a thing. In node you by default have a WebAssembly object giving you access to the necessary features.

Here's an example (untested, just found it via Google) [https://gist.github.com/kanaka/3c9caf38bc4da2ecec38f41ba24b7...](https://gist.github.com/kanaka/3c9caf38bc4da2ecec38f41ba24b77df)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would like WebAssembly runtimes for embedded devices, both Linux and bare- metal for microcontrollers. The WS program would be called with current inputs (as data), and produce a datastructure describing output to set. This logic can then easily and safely be tested before deploy and updated over the air.

</comment><comment><USER23> The EOS blockchain uses webassembly and it's pretty cool. I've been working on a side project and its interesting to be writing a "smart contract" in C++ that compiles down to wasm.

[https://developers.eos.io/](https://developers.eos.io/)

</comment><comment><USER24> > Eventually I'll write a post about the wrong, but for now, the right: in > some sense, WebAssembly is a different way of accomplishing what the JVM set > out to do

I agree, it's exciting, but this is half (or less than) an article. These hyped-up technologies make me grumpy neck beard.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a bit light; I haven't blogged in a while because I'm trying to get back into it, and writing long posts is hard. Some people prefer shorter posts; it just depends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I, for one, want to rush out and grab a trademark on Node.wasm.</comment>