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

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#441

Post by zepto » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #424

zepto wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I was responding to this: “To me, if something acts logically like it is run from top to bottom, it's a scripting language.” I don’t see them as scripting languages, but that definition would include them.

And my point is that Haskell doesn't even look like it's run from top to bottom. Example, consider this mutually recursive definition at the top level: a = 1:b b = 2:a It doesn't, by any means logical or not, look like it runs from top to bottom. If so, the first line would have immediately been an error because `b` is an undefined name.

My mistake - I thought Haskell was like OCaml in not having a main function:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28711563/ddg#28711778

You broadly dismissed my entire comment, which was completely correct about Ocaml, but I accept that you are correct about Haskell.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#442

Post by hutzlibu » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:11 AM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #412

hutzlibu wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I bet most js devs would not be able to make a "hello world" in C. Like if you just gave them a text editor and the gcc manpage? Why would they know? It's an entirely new language to them. How are you going to learn a new language's syntax or library functions without a reference? If you gave a JS programmer a C programming textbook or tutorial they'd type out and run Hello World in about 2 minutes, like anyone els…

"If you gave a JS programmer a C programming textbook or tutorial they'd type out and run Hello World in about 2 minutes, like anyone else. "

There are lots of js programmers, who do programming by modifying copy and paste bits of code in a try and error method.

They don't know they use a dynamic scripting language. They don't know what a compiler is. They oft even don't know exactly what a variable is. So I doubt they boot up and run C in about 2 minutes. And man page? Terminal? What is that?

And if they manage after a while, they still don't understand printf, as it already uses pointers. They don't understand types. Etc.

Those are the people, who are eventually able to make a website somewhat work, but they never learned the basics. Thats why there are lots of terrible js devs around.

Oh and like someone else has mentioned, of course because people coming to js and insist to write js code in C style or in java style. When js is a prototype based language, requiring different methods. (even today when there is finally class support)

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#443

Post by edub » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

hcs wrote: post #254

edub wrote: post #190

it is interesting that the archive.org version of this press release has a semi-colon after AT&T; i can't remember if in 1995 we would write the code to be AT&T or if that came a bit later. perhaps the scraper thought it was an HTML entity starting with the & followed by the T and it added the semi-colon. or maybe it originally was posted in 1995 without the semi-colon and before it got indexed in 2002 by archive…

In the raw version of the archived page, found by adding "id_" after the URL[1], there is no semicolon. The link to netscape.com at the end is mysteriously missing still, "Additional information on Netscape Communications Corporation is available on the Internet at ," [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020606002913id_/http://wp.nets...

welp, I did not know that you could get the raw version. Thanks for the tip! It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312677

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#444

Post by rbg246 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

philo23 wrote: post #28

rbg246 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think it was this (I am sure someone here will know better): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) Albeit it was two years after the announcement.

Yeah, I remember people talking about Rhino when node.js originally came out, saying things like it's been tried before and wouldn't catch on.

Yes I heard the exact same.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#445

Post by viksit » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

Did no one see Marc Benioff from Oracle listed as the original point of contact for the consortium of sponsors? :)) (and some others that went on to become industry stalwarts).

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#446

Post by 29athrowaway » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #284

What stands out to me is how much more foresight they had than I'd thought about the ways JS would be used: > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the c…

Pei-Yuan Wei created the ViolaWWW browser in 1991.

His browser had many features, including:

- Stylesheets, similar to CSS

- Scripting support, using a scripting language (like JavaScript).

- The equivalent of Iframes

Pei-Yuan Wei is the man.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#447

Post by ptx » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

sjy wrote: post #439

ptx wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basing the definition on whether it's compiled or not doesn't help much. Python is actually compiled to bytecode, just like Java. Is it not a scripting language? Or is the distinction that the Python bytecode is interpreted whereas Java is JIT compiled to machine code? Well, Java didn't get the JIT compiler until version 1.3 - so was Java 1.2 a scripting language?

The distinction is the existence, from the developer’s perspective, of a separate step called “compilation,” which produces an executable artefact which can be distributed but not converted back to the source code. It’s about programming in practice, not fundamental computer science principles.

I agree, this practical view makes more sense. However, the Kotlin compiler can be invoked either explicitly like Java or implicitly like Python. Is Kotlin a scripting language?

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#448

Post by drittich » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:44 AM UTC

deft wrote: post #368

brundolf wrote: post #284

What stands out to me is how much more foresight they had than I'd thought about the ways JS would be used: > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the c…

ASP, the original one before .net, had a language called jscript that ran the ie js engine on the server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript

Yes, I coded in JScript happily for about 3 years. Even better, using Windows Scriptlets let me write dynamically-compiled COM components in JavaScript that I would call from the web pages. As a result, I could launch updates independently in a microservice-like fashion, share the same libraries (like validation) on client and server, and use the same COM components in crons. Not bad at all! Also, because we had COM components, we could now use Window's built-in message queue MSMQ for async processes like payment transactions. I started doing this in 2003 - looking back, that was a pretty good developer experience.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#449

Post by ojosilva » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 12:16 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #334

ojosilva wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. JavaScript was a web language for web developers to be able to automate forms, etc, client-side. AFAIK, originally it was never intended to run on the JVM server-side like Groovy does. Netscape did try to position server-side JavaScript as part of its Enterprise Server package though, but it was not JVM-based. But the environment was proprietary and not compelling enough for a myriad of reasons. It ran server Jav…

> No. JavaScript was a web language for web developers to be able to automate forms, etc, client-side. AFAIK, originally it was never intended to run on the JVM server-side like Groovy does. Sure, but that's not an argument against JavaScript having potentially been a planned part of the JVM ecosystem (or, at least, a language playing a role in the JVM ecosystem, without itself being hosted on the JVM, instead maybe…

The JVM wasn't a thing you "targeted" until much later. In 1996 there was java and javac. People were ecstatic running the same programs written in Java on every architecture (SPARC, PowerPC, Itanium, 8086...), and even as a client or as a web applet. The "portability" wars of 80s and early 90s were over (that's where C and C++ were born into). Nobody really talked about JVM, because there was basically 1 Java vm, no HotSpot or OpenJDK and no real bytecode documentation. JS was not planned for the JVM. So much that there wasn't even a half decent JS to JVM compiler implementation until recently. JS was a joke until ES3, and a very subpar environment until v8 got fast, Node got serious and TC39 got their shit together after the ES4 clusterfuck.

If the Java@Netscape story came about earlier than 1995 then maybe yes, the JVM could have made into the browser as THE scripting environment for an eventual JavaScript language, because Java the language was not suited for webpage designers to throw something together un a highly evente environment. The browser was the place to be and Java just didn't make it there (they fought hard though with their applet crap).

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#450

Post by blackrock » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

JavaScript is such a crappy programming language, that its only saving grace, is that people keep building other programming languages that transpiles down to it.

So now, you have a poor language, with another layer of a different programming language. Is it any surprise that the web is so slow these days, with all these indirections?