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Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

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Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#271

Post by smt1 »

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 used Netscape 0.99 on a Mac. It was on a BMUG CD from 1994 that I would get a lot of freeware/shareware. Used it download SPRY Mosaic, which Microsoft licensed to create IE on Win95 soon after (I had already seen Mosaic running on CDE on HP/UX at my mom's scanning electron lab. she was getting a physics ph.d). Then I got a Mac clone from Metroworks. It had a pretty innovative C++ engine for its' time (PowerPlant), but I ended up booting into mkLinux (a mach-based linux) just in time for linux 2.0.0, discovering kde, then spending a while trying to emulate hacking at khtml/konqueror just to reverse engineer IE behavior "quirks" (5+ was a disaster) just to get websites to behave. Eventually both Apple and Chromium adopted khtml (webkit) instead of Gecko, before Firefox itself revived via Netscape and Mozilla (after it escaped the AOL/Time Warner fiasco). The funny thing is I use Firefox, chrome (on my android), and safari (on my Mac) much more than I use linux anymore. I'm pretty luckily to not have been just slightly too young (I'm mid 30s) to go after the original .com boom.

I enjoy Rust the days. Modern C++ certainly ain't bad, but nostdlib Rust is also the first serious threat to full spectrum C in a long time.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#273

Post by pjmlp »

hutzlibu wrote: post #256
pjmlp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only after Google sent a couple of torpedoes and then went as if it wasn't their business.

What torpedoes do you mean?

Android and ripping Sun off.

Then they were hoping that no one would buy them, not even themselves cared to own Java after their trick.

So now they push Kotlin, while researching Fuchsia, and keep a bunch of lawyers quite happy.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#275

Post by Mountain_Skies »

bitwize wrote: post #153
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?

The browser had an embedded JVM and applets ran right on the page. It was very similar to WebAssembly today, just a fair bit chuggier. Two things caused people to backpedal from the applet strategy: 1) Because there was a large hiring pool of millions of fresh grads leaving college with a little Java under their belts, it having displaced C++ and Pascal as an introductory language, companies began Java projects and J…

The death of Microsoft's JVM is when I lost most of my interest in Java. I understand why Sun didn't want Microsoft's JVM to exist. They could see Embrace, Extend, Extinguish coming for them but wow, did Microsoft's version ever work better. I did go on to create a good bit of Java code professionally but never touched it for hobby work.

It really hurt Java in the browser when Microsoft refused to ship Sun's code with Windows. Not sure why Sun assumed that after suing Microsoft about the JVM, they'd be willing to distribute Sun's bits for them. They really seemed surprised and angry when this happened and were unprepared for it. Maybe pivoting to browser plug-ins was the only way forward they could see. Seems like the actual path forward would have been to make the Sun JVM better.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#276

Post by munificent »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #268
alisonkisk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun had some great people and some good ideas and products, but as a coherent business it was a rolling train wreck.

Sun had an unhealthy Microsoft obsession. When I was a senior in college, Microsoft came to campus and gave a two hour presentation on why we should work at Microsoft. About a month later Sun came to campus and gave a two hour presentation on why we should not work at Microsoft. Sun workstations were very common in our engineering program so we were ripe for the picking but Sun never explained to us what was so great…

> Sun had an unhealthy Microsoft obsession.

I think basically everyone did back then. There was a pervasive understanding that if you were small enough, Microsoft would use underhanded business practices to crush you if you became a threat. If you made a compelling product, Microsoft would clone it and use their might to make it win.

It felt like taking a pottery class with a grizzly bear in the room. Really hard to be like, "I should just make the prettiest bowl I can" when you know at a moment's notice your head might be swiped off.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#277

Post by lolive »

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…

I think they still have the problem today. Which makes any JVM language to be slow to run in elastic environments (where hardware instances and server runs quickly come and go depending on the load).

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#278

Post by hutzlibu »

pjmlp wrote: post #273
hutzlibu wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What torpedoes do you mean?

Android and ripping Sun off. Then they were hoping that no one would buy them, not even themselves cared to own Java after their trick. So now they push Kotlin, while researching Fuchsia, and keep a bunch of lawyers quite happy.

So implementing and pushing Java in Android was a torpedo against Sun?

Interesting logic.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#279

Post by Mountain_Skies »

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.

Sigh. Working in cybersecurity, it makes me sad to see how much ColdFusion is still in use, full of security holes that no one will fix because the original developers have long since moved on and current developers don't want to touch anything CF related with a ten foot pole.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#280

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 »

calibas wrote: post #258
astura wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think if you combined the two "different" answers to why it's named JavaScript, you get the truth. Yes, it was promoted as a companion scripting language for Java, but that was in part because Java was so hot at the moment, so marketing had something to do with the decision to name it JavaScript.

Why "script" though? Aren't Java and JavaScript both script(ing languages)?

Why not call it e-Java or Java XYZ or something?

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