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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)

#181

Post by Semaphor »

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?

Sure, I bought one off ebay for 0.10€ :D

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

#182

Post by mettamage »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #175

I note that all those ecstatic quotes are from executives. Because the way I remember it, technical people hated it with a passion, from its design to its implementation. In fact, the most popular JS projects have always been to avoid writing ES5, its DOM API, or depending of one of its implementation: - scriptaculous: we hate even the basic types, so we monkey patch our own code into it. - jquery: don't use any of t…

> - webpack and babel: ES6 and 7 are not here yet, but ES5 is so bad we will setup an entire ecosystem dedicated to make believe they are. Also pretend import works like in other languages.

They just peeked over at their low level programming neighbours and realized what they did to avoid programming assembly and program C instead was a smart idea.

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

#183

Post by BiteCode_dev »

nicoburns wrote: post #179
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Haskell, when doing: $("foo").stuff().bar().res() jQuery feels like the list monad, if you see chaining as similar to bind and $() not so far from return. And for Lisp, jquery provided error handlers instead of relying on native try/except. Of course, it's more inspired from it than the real thing, but it's far from any JS paradigm of the time. Remember that JS didn't even have map() and the only place you used y…

You didn't even need first class functions for setInterval. setInterval also accepted a string!

Wow, I just tried:

    setInterval('console.log(1 + 1)', 1000);
And it works. It's a big eval().

Stealing this for my next JS training, beginners always have a hard time with callbacks, so it's a good first step to actually explain the benefits of callbacks.

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

#184

Post by blablabla123 »

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.

I remember doing a tutorial from a computer magazine in the 90s. The article was presenting the basic features like for, while, if... So I thought wow, now I can program stuff in the web browser. The tutorial was then starting with hands-on code, like

    document.writeln("Hello world!");
Seems quite a natural thing to do when coming from other languages. But after playing around with it for an afternoon, I came to the conclusion: that's too difficult, I rather spend my time on something else. (If I remember correctly, at that time I was comfortable with Basic and had a little exposure to C++ and Pascal)

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

#185

Post by BiteCode_dev »

nabla9 wrote: post #71

JavaScript is perfect example of Worse is Better http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Early JavaScript sucked bad. It sucked small planets. As PG said 2005 about Web 2.0. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html >Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works."

I don't think it is. If JS had any sane competition, I think it would have lost. By some weird conjunction of events, it landed a monopoly on the most amazing plateform in the world.

PHP is a good example of Worse is Better, because it won over the competition, despite its flaws.

HTML vs xHTML as well. Bash, maybe?

But JS didn't win. It was the only one there.

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

#186

Post by goto11 »

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.

Then everyone would hate scheme now :-) The primary problems with JavaScript was browser incompatibilities and bugs, mostly related to the DOM, and a limited standard library. Using a different language syntax wouldn't have alleviated those problems.

But I like the idea of angle brackets for content and parentheses for script.

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

#187

Post by uk_programmer »

tasogare wrote: post #172
JimDabell wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's nitpicking. Javascript was the only language that could be used to manipulate DOM so it's normal to conflate the two.

Well to nitpick your nitpick. Internet Explorer did allow you to use vbscript to manipulate the DOM.

http://www.herongyang.com/VBScript/IE-Browser-DOM-API-Docume...

Also you can use XSLT to create a new DOM tree in a browser from an XML document.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=24032&seqNum...

EDIT: I forgot about JScript vs JavaScript vs ECMAScript.

https://johnresig.com/blog/versions-of-javascript/

However much of this isn't relevant today.

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

#188

Post by mmcgaha »

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…

I cannot remember the years, but IE ran on linux at some point in the 90s.

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

#189

Post by bryanrasmussen »

I wonder what Brendan Eich actually thought about it at the time, I mean he had and did do it pretty quickly. Was he actually thinking this will be really cool and people will need it or was he thinking stupid pointy haired bosses, we should use applets!

I mean the quality he did put into it argues for he thought it was really cool, but perhaps he is so much of a craftsman he wouldn't put in less effort on something he considered to be a bad idea (unfortunately not many people have this admirable quality

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