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

121–130 of 241 posts

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

#121

Post by steego »

tabtab wrote: post #64
steego wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because they hadn't used it yet. :) In all seriousness, everyone was in on Java. Even Microsoft (Everyone was in on Java, even Microsoft ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B ). So most of us saw browser plugins and applets as the future, and some of those plug-ins were very impressive in those days. JavaScript was seen as a glue language to manipulate components built in better languages. We thought…

I also thought Java was the future. But, Java tried to be an entire virtual OS, and gained too many security holes because of that. Flash had a similar fate. It's not that JavaScript solved that, it's that it's built into the browser such that you can't really skip it. Like the Java and Flash engine, a web browser is also a fat bloated leaky client. However, if you toss the first two, you are then dealing with 1 fat…

Do you think the security holes killed Java and Flash? Or do you think they were just nails in the coffin?

I suspect performance and inconsistent experience killed Java applets and Sun stopped caring about desktop Java when they realized they can't make much money off it. Flash stuck around a lot longer than Java because it was fast, fun and ran consistently. It still lingered for some time after Jobs poisoned it.

Honestly, I don't think people cared that much about running updates. For most people, if the computer tells them they need to update, they update. I also don't think average users cared about security issues back then.

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

#122

Post by omegabravo »

airstrike wrote: post #116
asiachick wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GMail had a massive impact, but I didn't really think it was novel from a technical JS perspective. It was really basic, and loaded fast. It had excellent fast search and very good junk mail rejection.

Most email providers had approximately 100Mb mailbox limit (I can't remember specifically), but Gmail had 1Gb.

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

#123

Post by lowercased »

chc wrote: post #100
asiachick wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think many people knew about Oddpost, whatever it was, so it seems a bit suspect to say it influenced a lot of developers' perceptions of JavaScript.

As someone who was doing web development at that time (since '96 actually), oddpost did have an impact on perception of JS and what was possible among developers. Yahoo buying them was kind of a big deal at the time, and every developer I knew who was involved in web stuff had seen it or at least heard about it.

The biggest drawback at the time was that it was window/IE only, and when gmail was released, google made an effort to be cross-platform.

IMO, Google's 'big win' wasn't so much showing what JS could do, but that complex JS could be done cross-browser and cross-platform.

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

#124

Post by karatestomp »

asveikau wrote: post #107
karatestomp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My love of a paycheck drives me to give deference to the new normal. Meanwhile real desktop programs are still way more pleasant to use and way more respectful of my system resources, and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

> and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones. I dunno, there are some pretty egregious examples of this being false though. gmail is one such example. I remember using webmail in the days where every action was a full page load -- and we had slower connections then too, which made it hurt even more. Then gmail came out and blew everybody away with its response ti…

“AJAX” when it was mostly grabbing chunks of HTML to insert or otherwise not doing much but “grab, render” was sometimes faster. Not so much these days.

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

#125

Post by BoiledCabbage »

outworlder wrote: post #98
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…

> These things started to change in the early 2000. So deeply ingrained with the disgust for JavaScript, that it took a very long time for the consensus to emerge that you could actually build very complex software on a post-V8 runtime. I wonder how history would have looked like if Scheme had been used instead, as was the original intention. Or perhaps, Lua.

Much better if it had gone with Scheme

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

#126

Post by TheCycoONE »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #125
outworlder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These things started to change in the early 2000. So deeply ingrained with the disgust for JavaScript, that it took a very long time for the consensus to emerge that you could actually build very complex software on a post-V8 runtime. I wonder how history would have looked like if Scheme had been used instead, as was the original intention. Or perhaps, Lua.

Much better if it had gone with Scheme

With scheme perhaps, but the Lua of 1995 was a much more primitive language which didn't even support closures. It had the opportunity to break backwards compatibility and refine itself numerous times - as the defacto language of the web I think lua would have turned out much poorer rather than the web much better.

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

#127

Post by blahyawnblah »

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.

Outlook was the first true web 2.0 (or SPA) website. It's what XHR was built for.

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

#128

Post by JimDabell »

dillonmckay wrote: post #119
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?

The "X" in the acronym comes from XMLHttpRequest, an API that was originally provided by Internet Explorer to enable fetching XML in Outlook Web Access. It wasn't until later that fetching JSON with it became popular – XMLHttpRequest predates JSON by a few years.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

SoylentOrange wrote: post #76

The article conflates “popular” with “loved”. JS is popular because it’s the only* language in which it’s possible to write browser apps and extensions. The number of people using transpilers for this purpose is minimal. In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible, instead using TS or other languages that compile down to JS. Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular is like saying…

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by wolco »

omegabravo wrote: post #122
airstrike wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GMail had a massive impact, but I didn't really think it was novel from a technical JS perspective. It was really basic, and loaded fast. It had excellent fast search and very good junk mail rejection. Most email providers had approximately 100Mb mailbox limit (I can't remember specifically), but Gmail had 1Gb.

It was novel to release gmail at that scale in javascript. It hasn't been done before. 1Gb was a crazy size.

Anybody remember gmail invites?

Post reply on HN