HN user
The whole "web developers can't be talented, passionate, real programmers" narrative is very myopic, tired, and just down right flawed. "Real programmer" machismo, in general, has no place on HN or any community that thrives to be productive and constructive.
This post is right, but only because web technology is currently a second-class citizen on almost every native environment. If you were to expose system API's directly to the JS layer à la FirefoxOS, then I'm pretty sure you could recreate most "native" apps on web based platform with minimal / narrowing performance hits. Booting to browser technology can only get better with projects like ChromeOS and FirefoxOS pushing the envelope, so why not push for a unified application runtime in the web across devices? Sure, html wasn't made for rich applications, but html5 was...