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Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

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Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#221

Post by pjmlp »

flowerlad wrote: post #207
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

Remember, Sun needed Netscape to make Java successful. Today Java is a server-side technology, but that's not how it started its life. Java started its life as a technology to build more powerful web pages (using embedded applets). Sun needed Netscape to bundle Java into its browser. So if Netscape wanted to leverage the hype that existed around Java at that time then Sun had to let them.

They also needed Oracle and IBM, their two major partners in the early Java days.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#222

Post by duxup »

commandlinefan wrote: post #204
duxup wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wiithout validation form validation still is wonky if you want to do it on the browser / client end. I see so many "you don't need JS" articles that mention some of the basic HTML type form field validations and they're nice-ish... they're never enough.

Yeah - OTOH, it was a double-edged sword, since you had to re-run the same validation on the server side, and you had to be careful to make sure they were in sync. Of course, this brings back painful memories of multiple occasions where somebody said, "this is dumb, we already validated it on the client side, we don't have to re-validate it on the server side" and took out the server-side validation (even after I tri…

It's just hard to avoid the whole two pronged validation situation. You just have to accept you're going to do it on both ends.

If at all possible I think of client side as "active" validation with lots of feedback and such built in. Back end is "passive / defensive" where validation is more 'nope just not gonna do that'.

Every time I think "let's see how much I can do this on the back end" it ends up being kinda wonky, I'm sure it is possible but just human interaction type stuff, I like it on the front. Security, detailed rules, etc, back.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#223

Post by TomGullen »

ptx wrote: post #144
cesarb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail That existed without JavaScript (and IIRC it was somewhat common back when JavaScript was a novelty):

Periodically tearing down the entire UI while the user is in the middle of using it is a terrible user experience.

That’s not how it was usually implemented though, you’d have frameless iframes that refreshed - eg for chat rooms etc

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#224

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Delphi is still around, and there is a striving community in Germany, big enough to keep conferences and magazines going.

But yeah, Borland really messed up.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#225

Post by ethbr0 »

Gunax wrote: post #217
ethbr0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you think it would be better if they did understand it? You can be a Java dev for years (forever really) without understanding how the JVM works. I don't see why the web has to be any different.

"They" was intended to be the customers: the clients paying for development.

Ime, the less visibility and knowledge customers have into an implementation, the more opportunity there is for developers (especially contract) to go off the rails.

When the code behind "it works in my browser" is completely opaque... that doesn't set up the best technical incentives in the market. Past "minimize time-to-deliver".

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#226

Post by viktorcode »

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

It was supposed to be Scheme in the browser, not an inconsistent typeless error-prone mess.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#227

Post by snazz »

lostcolony wrote: post #187
ethbr0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 think that's something JS also shares with Java, no. A huge number of the people focusing in it are terrible devs.

It's popular and taught in schools, so I don't think this is really surprising.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#228

Post by paulryanrogers »

DonHopkins wrote: post #168
paulryanrogers wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for clarifying. That said the impression I got at the time is that his motivation to leave appeared closely tied to controversy around his past donations and personal beliefs. Hence the "under present circumstances" statement.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#230

Post by MentallyRetired »

lostcolony wrote: post #185
arendtio wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still bothers me when people talk about dynamic HTML these days. Just two weeks ago some team lead said it and I thought 'dude, that is so 90s'.

It's also probably incorrect; DHTML didn't involve loading data via AJAX after the page loaded, but instead configuring the webpage on the client side after loading it. That said, ask them if they'd prefer the backend in PHP or Coldfusion.

As someone who's been making websites since 1993, everything you said here has made me twitch in one way or another. I've been a ColdFusion team lead, a PHP developer and I used to write DHTML scripts.

Also RIP to separation of concerns on the frontend (document [html], style [css] and behavior [js]) since it's all buried in javascript nowadays.

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