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

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#241

Post by bdcravens » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

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.

Given that Wordpress can be targeted as an API for a SPA and Laravel is pretty hot, I'd say PHP isn't a bad choice.

ColdFusion of course is pretty out of vogue, but places like Invision like it still.

A better comparison would be with ASP 3 or Perl.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#242

Post by flomo » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

arendtio wrote: post #175

atum47 wrote: post #123

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 tha…

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'.

Reminded me of the MS "DHTML Dude" blog. (no longer online, it appears.)

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#243

Post by doublerabbit » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #196

doublerabbit wrote: post #88

It's a shame too that TCL wasn't chosen to be the script of choice.

There was a whole war about that, in which Sun originally supported TCL (having hired John Ousterhout), that was started by RMS firing the first shot ("Why you should not use TCL"), but which TCL eventually lost. 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 1…

Awesome read. Thank you.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#244

Post by Aperocky » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #240

duxup wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably anything popular enough has a good chunk of terrible devs? 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 ;)

Curious about the relative areas of esoterica... Are there bad COBOL developers still practicing? FORTRAN? What about Ada? Erlang? Smalltalk? The mainframe families?

There could be bad developer in COBOL but you would never hear about them.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#245

Post by bdcravens » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #77

Orthw2020 wrote: post #19

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

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

I worked at a computer store/ISP - the owner was a VB guy, and coded up some stuff on our intranet in it. I recall his shock that it didn't work in Netscape.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#246

Post by godot » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

jzer0cool wrote: post #231

My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others. When I think back IE browser was the top browser and there were all sorts of workarounds to get it html compliant (or rather IE compliant). Easy to learn html, but hard to get it working right. Then adding in javascript for the added dynamic flair. I wanted to learn javasc…

I find the fragmentation interesting. In the mid to late 90s when I was first on the internet, the "prominent search engines" ranked (given to me by my ISP and some other sites) was something like AltaVista, Yahoo, InfoSeek, with Webcrawler and Hotbot down at the bottom. I believe my ISP distributed IE (3 at the time) with whatever internet software cd they included, and it was my first and default browser. Later on I tried installing Netscape Navigator, but it felt slow and clumsy compared to IE3 at the time, so I never understood why anyone used it. It's quite interesting how our internet experiences were so different!

What is the same between us however is I also learned coding practically by first starting to make HTML pages, and some Javascript, and that was also my way into the technical field (decade and a half of working as a software engineer now). Like, sure, there were computer programming classes in school and every class used Pascal at the time (Quick or Turbo). It didn't feel like creating anything useful for the real world though; whereas with the web, I was immediately creating something for the world to see. I'd say learning to make web pages on my own was 99% of the reasons I became a software engineer later. The programming classes in high school, not so much.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#247

Post by hutzlibu » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #109

newyorker2 wrote: post #11

> 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)

There are lots of terrible js devs, because js is easy to start with.

I bet most js devs would not be able to make a "hello world" in C. And pointers? What is that?

So for those people(not meant in a negative way) it is good that they can use a language to get things done, even if they have no academic background.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#248

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

jzer0cool wrote: post #231

My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others. When I think back IE browser was the top browser and there were all sorts of workarounds to get it html compliant (or rather IE compliant). Easy to learn html, but hard to get it working right. Then adding in javascript for the added dynamic flair. I wanted to learn javasc…

Thunderbird debuted as Netscape mail and was combined in Netscape Communicator suite I believe. Memory fuzzy.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#249

Post by bdcravens » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #94

Kye wrote: post #2

Think of how the web would be different if Microsoft leaned its monopoly power on XMLHttpRequest. Would it have been the test case for API ownership instead of Java? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

XHR is possibly Microsoft's "Xerox PARC" moment. They held the future in their hands and it just went through their fingers.

They also had VBScript and ActiveX in IE. I think had they held onto XHR it would have gone the same route, and a comparable alternative would have been developed.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#250

Post by stolenmerch » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #124

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #65

Earlier 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.

I would agree that Actionscript 3 as an implementation of ECMAscript is more of a delight than JavaScript as a language which conforms to whatever version of ECMAscript. But compiling to VMs in the browser? Never again.