Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995) • Hacker News Board

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#121

Post by ethbr0 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #107

mabbo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they understand the repercussions. Imagine if you said that the pain and suffering of every developer for the last 25 years was largely your fault. There would be lawsuits. Class action. We'd all travel to come testify.

>Imagine if you said that the pain and suffering of every developer for the last 25 years was largely your fault. Hyperbole and nonsense. No one was "suffering" under Javascript until Node and compile-to-js languages and the Byzantine nightmare of a development environment that they created came along. No one was shouting "Javascript Delenda Est" when all you needed was an FTP account and a text editor to configure a…

> Silicon Valley's fault

Personally, I'd lay this at the "copy & paste, boot camp-trained" webdevs community's feet, along with their customers.

Js has an unfortunate ecosystem dynamic where its primary customers (I want to X on the web) don't understand it, so its primary developers don't have any standardization pressure (fragmentation / spaghetti at the wall), browsers are forced to enable this behavior via monkey patching standardization in presentation, so its end users (browser users) are oblivious to everything under the hood.

It's like the perfect storm of hidden sausage-making.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#122

Post by grishka » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

netdur wrote: post #35

Orthw2020 wrote: post #19

What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!

For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail

> Imagine a world without Javascript?

That would've been a better world. Imagine the web that isn't an application platform. (it still isn't, but it's being actively shoehorned into becoming one)

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#123

Post by atum47 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

I bought a book, when I was about 12-15 years old, called DHTML (Dynamic HTML). It blew my mind to see things moving across the screen with just code.

Keep in mind that I learned pure html when I was 10, my websites were all very static (apart from a animated GIF here and there). The only way you could do a cool menu, effect or animation, was with Java Applet (which I learned after purchasing a online Java course that was taught over ICQ - it doesn't get more 90's than that).

I have this love relationship with javascript ever since I wrote my first "alert('hello')" and I wish it a happy birthday with many more years to come.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#124

Post by grishka » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #65

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a world without Javascript? What a dream.

I'd be afraid flash would come back. Ah, those flashbacks...

Flash is better than JS to be honest. JS still hasn't caught up with ActionScript. The only bad part about Flash is that it's proprietary.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#125

Post by bluedino » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

ChrisRR wrote: post #81

acdha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing. Java was The Next Big thing and they wanted to jump on board that bandwagon. The direct integration wasn’t very common but a lot of the JavaScript objects had similar names (toString, etc.) and JS was commonly explained as a sort of junior relationship. Edit: expanding my not very common claim — I first started using JavaScript when it was called LiveScript in Netscape betas, the second non-static website…

It's very odd, if someone nowadays called their language CSharpScript, they'd get slapped with a C&D

Nobody outside of developers knows what C# is, though.

Java was one of the biggest buzzwords of the late 90's.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#126

Post by bluedino » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #82

flohofwoe wrote: post #5

Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent scripting language for web browsers JAVA script truly demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of computing (at least the corporate side).

It was actually a fairly exciting time...? OOP had really just broken into the mainstream (with Java, the first OOP to really take off) and would go on to become ubiquitous, spawning tons of little new languages (including Python). There were multiple vendors pushing VB-like products, some arguably better than MS itself, giving high levels of productivity (who some argue have never been achieved since). PCs had drama…

Java is like 3-4 years older than Python.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#127

Post by icedchai » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #101

tjansen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you have never used VBScript, which was the major alternative back then.

VBScript is actually a later development, in reaction to JS (or "DHTML", as we called it back then). But yeah, it was pretty bad too.

Not by much. VBScript was available with Internet Explorer 3.0, which was released in 1996. It was only a little later than early JS.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#128

Post by bluedino » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #38

flohofwoe wrote: post #5

Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent scripting language for web browsers JAVA script truly demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of computing (at least the corporate side).

Java was the most buzzwordy thing imaginable back then. Everything was Java Java Java

“By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/01/12/by-installing-java...

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#129

Post by ajuc » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #99

ChrisRR wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very odd, if someone nowadays called their language CSharpScript, they'd get slapped with a C&D

This was voluntary. You have to remember that at the time the residing hype kings were the so-called 4GLs (e.g. Clarion, Clipper, PowerBuilder) and things like Visual Basic, Pascal (Delphi), etc. so Sun and Netscape were trying to present this as the pair of languages which you used to build the web, which was already emerging as the white-hot new thing starting to transform the world.

Such a shame Clipper and Delphi didn't worked out.

In early 90s my uncle (now 60 years old electrical engineer) taught himself clipper from 0 (no programming background whatsoever, and no English language) and wrote a software for capturing and analysing temperature curves of polymer ovens at a factory where he works that is still used to this day. They keep a DOS PC just to run it :)

I don't think it's possible to do this with modern programming technology, there's too many layers of abstraction and unrelated asides blocking people from "just making it work".

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#130

Post by AndrewStephens » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #105

AndrewStephens wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly marketing but the integration certainly existed. As I recall, public methods in the main applet class are exposed to JavaScript. It was a little slow and clunky but it worked. The idea was similar to how web components are used today. Your web page would contain custom applets for a fancy input field, a calendar control date picker, and whatever other controls html didn’t provide, all implemented as Applets. I…

Technically, why are / were Java applets so slow? I never dug into the ecosystem deeply enough to understand (plus a bit before my time). Was it JVM startup time, Java xfactory-begat-y-begat-z code init time, what? Also, applets run outside the browser, correct? I.e. on the browser's host system in a separate JVM process?

Sun seemed to have a real mental block when it came to applets - people screamed at them for years about performance and they refused to do anything about it. Indeed, in 1995 the simpliest applet would take several seconds to appear. In 2005 (about the time everyone stopped caring), the same applet would take ... several seconds to appear. They never got faster even as CPUs improved by several hundred percent.

The Applets ran fast enough (even on 1995 machines) once loaded, at least fast enough to be useful. But that delay at startup when your CPU went to 100% and your hard drive buzzed away, freezing everything else you machine was doing, just killed any interest the public had in using applets.

Part of the problem is that they JIT'ed everything without caching it and that included the standard Java libraries. So every applet started to execute, called some standard API, the API was JIT'ed, that called some other part of the API which was JIT'ed, etc, etc. I could never understand why they didn't compile at least the standard libraries on install or first use and save the result.