191–200 of 476 posts
This is an important document, because it disproves the prevalent notion that Java and JavaScript have nothing to do with each other. JavaScript has come a long way, to where the shame of any self-respecting engineer has been reduced to a bearable minimum!
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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
Oracle now owns that trademark today
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseType=SERIAL_...
For what it's worth, Microsoft lost a lawsuit over their Java clone called J. Their Javascript clone was called JScript.
They made .net and C# instead and probably would have tried to make a new web language except that there was no room. One could argue that that VB.net was that language to some degree.
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web ASSEMBLY is not much better name.
Eh, the thing is until you said that it never occurred to me. However before I started to ever really code in the web world I was always wondering if javascript was really like a semi-java hack on the web or whatever. Everyone knows that we are so far removed from assembly that it creates zero confusion in reality.. javascript caused real confusion.
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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 W…
It's a shame too that TCL wasn't chosen to be the script of choice.
The Tcl War (1994) (vanderburg.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218
https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400
https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html
John Ousterhout's classy reply:
https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html
Personally, I was on the side of ScriptX at the time (essentially object oriented scheme with a more traditional syntax and a nice multimedia class library including QuickTime), but it wasn't mature or open enough at the time, and we lost too:
ScriptX and the World Wide Web. "Link Globally, Interact Locally". By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX
The real tragedy is that the script of choice for the web was't Lua:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092
by DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 [–]
Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
"In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API."
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. >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 ove…
>> can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications ... has it? ;-) (Note: joke with deference to the huge pool of incredibly talented js developers! But there are still a lot of mind bogglingly terrible js devs too)
I'm guessing there are some very unpopular languages out there that the % of highly skilled devs is pretty high, but I don't know if that means much ;)
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Brendan Eich addresses that topic in this interview. The whole interview is (very much!) worth a read but here's some key parts about the name https://www.infoworld.com/article/2653798/javascript-creator... >It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to…
So, basically, JavaScript was originally annointed to serve the function within the JVM ecosystem, that ended up being served by Groovy? Why didn’t that happen? And why did it take so long before we got Groovy instead, if Sun wanted was imagining something like it way back in 1995?
What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!
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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 W…
Yeah I dunno about that. HotJava was aggressively awful to use.