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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)

#131

Post by JimDabell »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #13
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.

jQuery was invented for basically two reasons, neither of them about making JavaScript suck less.

1. Introduce a "chaining" API.

2. Paper over the differences between how browsers implemented the DOM, with events being the big issue.

Note that the DOM is not JavaScript and JavaScript is not the DOM. The DOM is a language-agnostic API for manipulating markup-based documents.

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

#132

Post by mr_toad »

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…

> Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

Except that they couldn’t alter the DOM, or handle events on DOM elements, the two things that developers really needed (even if they didn’t know it).

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

#133

Post by steego »

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.

To be honest, I was using JavaScript for years as an OOP language before I actually understood how I could use JavaScript as a functional language.

However, I don't think the limitation was the language. The biggest limitation really were bug ridden browsers. Trying to get something to work across all browsers was incredibly challenging because so many basic features simply didn't work.

Had the syntax been based on scheme, my guess is scheme's reputation would have suffered. I think people have a tendency to blame the thing that they understand the least, so I could see people blaming scheme for the browser's failings.

Also, I went to a university that taught SICP and I'm sorry to say it wasn't popular. Again, when things didn't work, there was a tendency to blame the thing that was least understood.

I could see a Lua-like syntax being approachable, but even that wouldn't have helped. Again, the biggest problem with JavaScript was being tethered to buggy browsers that often failed when you asked them to do simple things.

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by wyclif »

wolco wrote: post #130
omegabravo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I remember Gmail invites. Ironically, Evan Williams (formerly of Twitter, now of Medium, at the time working at Google after they bought Blogger) was the person who sent me mine—and on the morning of April 1st, 2004. So I've had a Gmail account since the first day it was publicly available.

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

#136

Post by anthk »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #126
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something like TCL would be far better. Or Inferno.

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

#137

Post by pavlov »

numtel wrote: post #118
pavlov wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a good point, it’s easy to forget about how closely watched Microsoft was by regulators.

But IMO it makes it all the more surprising that Microsoft doubled down on the centralized OS+API+apps leverage combo that had brought upon them the antitrust scrutiny, instead of dispersing their influence?

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

#138

Post by anthk »

underwater wrote: post #56
tabtab wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well. And STILL doesn't, at least for anything non-trivial. New browser brands or version often "break" a lot of libraries and code. It's not really JS's fault: HTML wasn't meant to be emulate real desktops, and shoehorning it to do so has made a giant tangled multi-layer mess. Browser standards should be split into three focus areas…

Websites don't exist in neat silos. Web technologies like JS aren't perfect, but they haven't failed be any stretch of the imagination. What other platforms are still alive and evolving decades after their creation?

- Tcl/Tk

- Perl5

- Python

- VT220/VT100 terminals + ncurses

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

#139

Post by treebornfrog »

wolco wrote: post #130
omegabravo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, had one from an uncle.

I then realised that I could invite a second account, so I created a handful of accounts and still own them today.

Good times.

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

#140

Post by bdefore »

egypturnash wrote: post #79
wslh wrote: post #67

JavaScript was used for very simple things when it was launched. Most pages used it for modifying button images when you hover or press a button, and for handling some web form operations. As others say JavaScript was very confusing, a programming language that was launched with Java in its name and to fill gaps in HTML limitations but there was no clear direction towards web app programming. Another confusing aspect…

Actionscript 1: a simple little language that could only be entered via a huge dropdown menu Actionscript 2: basically Javascript, when I was writing stuff in AS2 my O'Riley pocket JS guide saw a lot more use than the pocket AS guide. Actionscript 3: completely ECMAScript4, Macromedia/Adobe was on the standards board for that, but then Mozilla went a different way, I think, it is a giant mess [1]. Also AS3 was a lot…

As your source indicates, it was Microsoft that stonewalled ES4. By the time Adobe agreed to let it die, it was a capitulation that they had been vetoed.
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