Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 476 posts

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#161

Post by commandlinefan »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #86
overkill28 wrote: post #36

I 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…

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…

> the integration certainly existed.

Definitely. Even the fourth edition of Javascript: The Definitive Guide (published in 2002) still had an entire chapter on Java/Javascript compatibility.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#162

Post by toyg »

bluedino wrote: post #126
toyg wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

Python actually was first released in 1991, as James Gosling and friends had just started working on Java, but I can't even remember if python 1.x had classes at all.

Java was everywhere pretty much as soon as it landed in 1995, because SUN pushed it like crazy and loads of shops were actually looking for something better than C/C++ for a large number of apps. By the time Python 2.0 was released in 2000, OOP was pretty much a requirement for anything, and I'm pretty sure that had classes. Python didn't reach popularity in the mainstream until the late '00s anyway.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#163

Post by th0ma5 »

cies wrote: post #151

Not my fav announcement. This funny (I think) video shows why: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat Disclaimer: I like types, I hate automatic casting.

It is wild to revisit some of the inspiration of the kind of weaponized cynicism that hopefully we're getting away from. This talk was funny for sure, but it started a large amount of "computers are awful, look at what this stupid thing did" which was very harmful. Not because it isn't true, but because understanding why and how these things happen, dealing with and educated people surrounding these things, and trying to make things better is the goal (perhaps misplaced) of many in the industry. It is incredibly easy to just shit on things.

Still a pretty funny talk for sure.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#165

Post by commandlinefan »

nonesuchluck wrote: post #139

Not 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…

One of the big things back then was form validation. Web pages in the late 90's were necessarily very form driven (no AJAX back then), and users were frustrated to submit a form, wait for a response, only to be told that they were missing a required input (or as you suggest, 4 digits for zip code). So there were complex frameworks to let Javascript validate the form before it was submitted - the Struts framework would even generate the Javascript for you and keep it synchronized with the backend.

But yeah, there wasn't really a whole lot of functionality. You could do fancier things with the Layer API in Netscape, but it only worked in Netscape.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#166

Post by sradman »

mseepgood wrote: post #13

> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly I didn't know that server-side JS was a thing back then.

Netscape had LiveWire, Microsoft had ASP, and Sybase had PowerDynamo. The first version of ASP was interpreted and supported pluggable scripting engines including JScript and VBScript. The Netscape and Sybase DynaScript interpreters ran on various flavors of Unix and RISC chips and were used much like PHP, Rails, and Django; web interface to relational databases.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#167

Post by 725686 »

ajuc wrote: post #129
acdha wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

My older brother still maintains clipper code that is used in production.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#168

Post by DonHopkins »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #62
logicchains wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its created got fired from his job as CEO for creating it, isn't that punishment enough?

Eich wasn't fired for making JS. He was fired because of some political donations and opposing same sex marriage.

Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up.

Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?

As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716

DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...

Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”

Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#169

Post by lenkite »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #130
ethbr0 wrote: post #105

Earlier 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…

This was deliberate - they were afraid Java would become too popular on the browser side and people would stop buying their heavyweight servers. They always pushed Java as the server side language. If they wanted Java at the client side - they wanted pure Java clients (webstart, etc) not browsers hosting Java applets. Browsers hosting Java applets were sneered upon.

JS eventually won the game here after IE advanced Web 1.0 with great support for AJAX, etc.

The funny thing is that if Sun was on the ball and didn't abandon HotJava, your modern day browser would have been a Java app.

Post reply on HN