Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 241 posts

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

#111

Post by steego »

skinnymuch wrote: post #93
steego wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project. Updates were often committed live using…

Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?

They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all.

That's what Java applets and plugins were for.

I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins.

The reason it didn't really take off back then wasn't because of vision. It was because there was so little you could do with JavaScript. The browsers were still implementing the basic features and a lot of page/component manipulation was very broken. Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

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

#112

Post by swiley »

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.

Gmail is a great example of everything that sucks about web applications. Poor information density, crap sliding around underneath your mouse everytime you go to click, GUI changing every month, ambiguous pictograms everywhere.

Maybe users like native applications because native app programming sucks and it weeds out people who carelessly build things like that.

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

#114

Post by gwbas1c »

billziss wrote: post #38

I wrote my first website in 1995 and started using Javascript in 1996 (only I think it was called Livescript back then)? I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it. (Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!) My opinion of Javascript…

> This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant.

If you're going to do in browser development, what choice so you have? I can understand server-side JavaScript, mostly to avoid cognitive load from learning two languages.

Otherwise, I think WebAssembly is a lot more promising of a technology.

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

#115

Post by steego »

agumonkey wrote: post #96
steego wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project. Updates were often committed live using…

in 2004 a guy gave a talk about how they wrote large js apps, probably 1999-2000. they made a sturdy full fledged toolkit with nice prototypes. but at the time everything was in house

That's exactly why we were able to use it. For a while, we were IE only, but then we started to support Firefox (Only because the developers were fans and we started recommending it to users).

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

#116

Post by airstrike »

asiachick wrote: post #95
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.

Please don't repeat this non-fact. There were plenty of large SPAs before GMail. Oddpost existed 2 years before Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost It also felt more like an app than gmail ever has given it had the "standard" 3 panel look of most desktop email apps (same as most of them do today like Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple's Mail) And before that Outlook had a browser version that acted like a SPA since 19…

Outlook Web Access is absolute horseshit compared to OG gmail. Sure, it was JS-driven, but it wasn't good.

The apps you mentioned had nowhere near the impact that Gmail had in terms of showing what was possible

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

#117

Post by stan_rogers »

steego wrote: post #111
skinnymuch wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?

They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all. That's what Java applets and plugins were for. I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins. The reason…

Loading into a hidden or pixel-sized iframe (or ilayer in NS) was a thing before XMLHttpRequest as well. In what would now seem a scary technique, you would use JS to load more JS (plus data, of course) that would put the new data into the iframe's host page.

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

#118

Post by numtel »

pavlov wrote: post #89
carterehsmith wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Microsoft also exposed all of that HTML/JS engine as COM or whatever component, so it could be used by applications other than browser. I remember using Microsoft Money -- personal accounting software -- and it seemed to be all built on that HTML/JS engine.

It’s crazy how Microsoft had all the pieces in place in 2001 to own both the Chrome and Electron spaces. Even Apple was shipping IE as their default browser. By investing in cross-platform IE and making it both the best browser and the universal runtime for desktop-quality apps, they could have had “Windows Everywhere”. Instead they did the exact opposite and folded IE into a component of desktop Windows where it rec…

They had been recently sued for having a monopoly from bundling IE with Windows. The chain of events you describe was in many ways not a choice of Microsoft.

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

#119

Post by dillonmckay »

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…

I always thought the big paradigm shift was the introduction of xmlhttprequest.

Prior to that, it was really just form validation and cool DHTML interactions.

I also wonder why AJAX is not called AJAJ?

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

#120

Post by dillonmckay »

pavlov wrote: post #89
carterehsmith wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Microsoft also exposed all of that HTML/JS engine as COM or whatever component, so it could be used by applications other than browser. I remember using Microsoft Money -- personal accounting software -- and it seemed to be all built on that HTML/JS engine.

It’s crazy how Microsoft had all the pieces in place in 2001 to own both the Chrome and Electron spaces. Even Apple was shipping IE as their default browser. By investing in cross-platform IE and making it both the best browser and the universal runtime for desktop-quality apps, they could have had “Windows Everywhere”. Instead they did the exact opposite and folded IE into a component of desktop Windows where it rec…

In the context of that time, Electron would be considered inferior.
Post reply on HN