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What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

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Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#11

Post by jherdman »

danmg wrote: post #8
jbob2000 wrote: post #2

Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

It was not well liked. The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation. Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.

This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#12

Post by karatestomp »

jherdman wrote: post #11
danmg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not well liked. The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation. Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.

This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.

With TypeScript and async/await papering over its greatest sins and inconveniences, it's not half bad.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#13

Post by nickthemagicman »

aazaa wrote: post #5

The release of JavaScript was deeply confusing to me as a developer back then. Java applets and Macromedia Flash were already touted by their vendors as the one true way forward for interactivity. The scripting language released at about the same time seemed like an oddball. It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well. It was extremely slow, limiting the complexity of what co…

Jquery was invented and became massive for decades because it made js basically suck less.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#14

Post by qubex »

I vividly remember working on my school’s website in 1997 with Microsoft FrontPage. I had built a rather complicated system where it would be possible to arrive at the same page from several origins. Whereas most web-pages had hyperlinks or allowed the user to use the “Back” button on the browser.

I decided I was going to have none of that amateur stuff or reliance on what is now referred to as “browser chrome” (though if the term even existed back then, I surely wasn’t aware of it).

So I looked into this JavaScript thing, and wrote my first ever script embedded into a button:

onclick=“javascript.history.go(-1)”

I was so proud of myself. For about a year users of my school’s website were visibly amazed.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#15

Post by monocasa »

reflectiv wrote: post #10
aazaa wrote: post #5

The release of JavaScript was deeply confusing to me as a developer back then. Java applets and Macromedia Flash were already touted by their vendors as the one true way forward for interactivity. The scripting language released at about the same time seemed like an oddball. It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well. It was extremely slow, limiting the complexity of what co…

Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was even possible. After Gmail...things really started to move in the javascript world...people started to put effort into both the runtimes and the libraries.

And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#17

Post by asveikau »

danmg wrote: post #8
jbob2000 wrote: post #2

Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

It was not well liked. The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation. Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.

Not only that, for years afterwards the techie crowd and equivalent of places like HN (I suppose I am mostly talking about slashdot) had a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, etc.

I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like gmail in 2004 were a turning point.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#18

Post by l33tman »

jbob2000 wrote: post #2

Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

As far as I can remember, people didn't really think much about it, after all without all the modern libraries the language was useless, and browsers were only marginally able to run Active-X and Java stuff anyway so people weren't even into the mindset that "this new language could be used to write web apps".

To me as a regular user, JavaScript was only there to do annoying popups at the start.

Funny how some things never change...

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#19

Post by pimlottc »

danmg wrote: post #8
jbob2000 wrote: post #2

Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

It was not well liked. The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation. Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.

I wouldn’t say it was unliked. It enabled image rollovers and people _loved_ those.

Re: What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

#20

Post by nogridbag »

monocasa wrote: post #15
reflectiv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was even possible. After Gmail...things really started to move in the javascript world...people started to put effort into both the runtimes and the libraries.

And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.

Do you have a source for this? Google did create a Java to JavaScript compiler/web framework: GWT but as far as I understood this was never used by the Gmail team. In fact, I heard there was pushback against using this on Gmail.
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