Related - A project posted earlier today:
Mocha1995 - The world's first JavaScript engine written in 1995 by Brendan Eich, now compiled back to JS and WASM
https://github.com/doodlewind/mocha1995/blob/main/blog/about...
Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
131–140 of 476 posts
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You may have that backwards. The first releases of Python happened in the early 90's.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's true, it's more like naming your language "BlockchainScript". I could totally see someone doing that today.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#134I remember this, when the HTML chats didn't need to be manually refreshed anymore...
I still test with Netscape 2.0 out of respect, and some JS features work with it on my site.
The Web is just amazing, I can write across 25 years of platforms from a dozen different vendors, totally unrelated, and it works in all of them!
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#135I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated. > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterpris…
It's because you could integrate a Java applet with JavaScript in the page and have it all interoperate.
Pretty cool, too bad Java was so heavy...
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When flash was focused, my keyboard shortcuts didn't work. I hated it just for that.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#137Damn, I was 7 at the time. And by the time I was 17, and just starting to build websites, it still felt like Javascript was barely a baby.
I was 10 when it came out and wrote my first line of JS with 18 or something. It already felt dated to me at that time.
I was....older....when it came out and so wrote my first Javascript code around 96. Actually back then it felt like a breath of fresh air. A way to run logic in the browser that interacted with HTML. Nobody saw it as a replacement to Java applets, Flash, Shockwave (anyone remember that plugin and Macromedia Director?), etc but it did open the door to make basic web pages a little more dynamic.
Some time before 2000 (though I forget which year precisely) I even submitted some Javascript to Planet Source Code (anyone remember that website?) that simulated a Windows 95 desktop; complete with interactive start menu and task bar. That submission was the highest rated for that month and was awarded some free software as a prize -- though I never claimed that prize in the end.
It's true that the early days of Javascript was rather lacklustre (not helped with the the IE/Netscape wars) and thus few people took it seriously as something that could displace Java applets nor Flash. But it was still widely used as something to make traditional web design a little more flexible (eg Javascript refreshes).
Part of my actually misses those days. Web design was simpler in some ways (it was predominantly backend generated* HTML with JS sprinkled about sparsely). Though I don't miss browser incompatibilities -- even basic things like displaying a table (not a grid of divs, a literal ) was fraught with different browsers rendering the table differently.
* and in fairness, I was always more of a backend engineer rather than frontend designer anyway
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#138I didn't realise JS only appeared in late '95.
I first used the web in early-mid '95; it must've been around April-May of that year.
I'm no JS-hater, but it's still nice to think I had a brief few months of script-free web use before the JS era dawned.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#139Not being on the web until the late 90s, the part I've never figured out is, what could you actually _do_ with JavaScript in the initial versions?
The way I understand it, early JavaScript could only address HTML forms, links, and images. Can't modify HTML tags. Can't insert new elements. Can't update the page and re-render until DHTML in the version 4 browsers. Can't query the network until XHR.
Ok, so now what?
Do you just pop up an alert() when someone types 4 digits for a Zip code instead of 5? Image rollovers? Is that it?
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Ap…
From everything I've touched Sun was always very... Unix in regards to UX.
As in "Well, just learn to deal with it. And be grateful you have a graphical interface at all."
Making things better, or pushing the state of graphical presentation art never seemed to even be a core interest, much less competency.
Which is ironic, because a lot of that organizational choice seems reflected in Java, e.g. having to boil the ocean and re-implement everything for major arch changes.