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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)

#21

Post by andykellr »

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.

Inbox was definitely written using GWT, as were other major google products, but not gmail as far as I know.

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

#22

Post by LandR »

asveikau wrote: post #17
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.

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 pe…

>a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content,

I still feel like this.

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

#23

Post by asveikau »

LandR wrote: post #22
asveikau wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

>a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, I still feel like this.

Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new normal.

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

#24

Post by echelon »

pier25 wrote: post #4

The GIFs are the best part

I'm actually very disappointed in the gifs.

Most of the memes are faux retro. The fiji water bottle is representative of the vaporwave aesthetic from 2016 or so. The font animation is also super modern, circa early 2010s. It's all fake.

They should have pulled more stuff from Geocities archive. This is not how things were.

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

#25

Post by steego »

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.

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 remote scripting (A precursor to AJAX) and we did a lot of DOM manipulation to update content in-place. At that time, we targeted IE because Netscape's support for DOM manipulation was abysmal.

While I have to give Gmail credit where it's due, I have to give Firefox the real credit for doing the hard work and finally releasing an alternative to IE that kicked JavaScript into high gear. If Gmail had never happened, it would have only been a matter of time before SPAs were going to become a thing. There were more of us doing it before Gmail than most people realize.

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

#26

Post by karatestomp »

asveikau wrote: post #23
LandR wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, I still feel like this.

Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new normal.

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.

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

#27

Post by russellbeattie »

I think that for consumer applications, JavaScript took a while to be really useful - like someone else noted Gmail was the first serious JS app I can think of. But for Intranets, it was pretty essential pretty quickly as web apps took over from Lotus Notes, Access databases, a million dBase applications and other proprietary front ends. And Microsoft was pushing it (and VBScript) hard in Internet Explorer under the DHTML moniker.

In 1999 I worked on a contract for Levi's in SF and clearly remember using JavaScript to pull data from a huge hierarchy of product styles and presenting it to the end user as a widget where they could add/remove/move entries around. I remember abusing the cookies API to save the latest client state between page refreshes as it was the only real way to do that at the time. Something like this would have been a total pain in the ass without logic in the browser. In fact, I may have been replacing some sort of Java Applet or ActiveX widget which did something similar in a slower, less flexible way.

So whether it was a huge success outside of corporations or not, I was using it to make a living pretty much from day one.

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

#28

Post by svachalek »

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.

I think most of it was written for the Closure compiler (JS-to-JS), with some bits like chat windows in GWT (Java-to-JS).

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

#29

Post by dylan604 »

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.

It was my impression that Gmail's big hit was its use of AJAX more than just its use of Javascript in general. Until then, it was just this obscure thing MS created, but it wasn't really used in the wild until Gmail.

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

#30

Post by steego »

rdiddly wrote: post #16

Wow, apparently JavaScript was 100% great and there was nothing at all negative about it ever, according to people in tech!

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 there was going to be a rich component marketplace that was going to be embedded in web pages. We didn't think we'd still be mucking around with HTML and DOM manipulations.

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