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Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

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Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#231

Post by jzer0cool »

My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others.

When I think back IE browser was the top browser and there were all sorts of workarounds to get it html compliant (or rather IE compliant). Easy to learn html, but hard to get it working right. Then adding in javascript for the added dynamic flair.

I wanted to learn javascript & I ended up learning first java not knowing the difference at the time. Fun times were also spent at Barnes & Nobles / Borders (bookstore in U.S.) - checking out technical books and eventually I toiled through learning VBScript / Windows IIS to extend out a simple ecommerce site and possibly paving my way into the technical field.

Didn't Netscape also have email integration? I can't recall anymore as I went through multiple internet providers like Aol.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#232

Post by TomGullen »

timw4mail wrote: post #75
mseepgood wrote: post #13

> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly I didn't know that server-side JS was a thing back then.

Classic ASP had JScript, I once had the dubious pleasure of using JScript instead of VB on an ASP website.

Ugh, did some freelance work when I was younger in classic asp, got a project do work on an asp site and day one turned up it was all jscript! Nightmare!

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#233

Post by ethbr0 »

lostcolony wrote: post #187
ethbr0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications ... has it? ;-) (Note: joke with deference to the huge pool of incredibly talented js developers! But there are still a lot of mind bogglingly terrible js devs too)

I think that's something JS also shares with Java, no. A huge number of the people focusing in it are terrible devs.

The relative trajectories of Java and JavaScript over the years are fascinating.

Java became a language that you can toss a 100-developers onto a project for, and incrementally grind out something that has a mostly-consistent architecture. Aka the perfect IBM Services language.

JavaScript became a language you can toss up a SPA in a day from boilerplate glueing together frameworks and only writing the use-specific bits. Aka the perfect web developer language.

As other commenter said, bad developers are probably a consequence of demand > supply for any language.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#235

Post by ojosilva »

derefr wrote: post #189
astura wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Eich addresses that topic in this interview. The whole interview is (very much!) worth a read but here's some key parts about the name https://www.infoworld.com/article/2653798/javascript-creator... >It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to…

So, basically, JavaScript was originally annointed to serve the function within the JVM ecosystem, that ended up being served by Groovy? Why didn’t that happen? And why did it take so long before we got Groovy instead, if Sun wanted was imagining something like it way back in 1995?

No. JavaScript was a web language for web developers to be able to automate forms, etc, client-side. AFAIK, originally it was never intended to run on the JVM server-side like Groovy does.

Netscape did try to position server-side JavaScript as part of its Enterprise Server package though, but it was not JVM-based. But the environment was proprietary and not compelling enough for a myriad of reasons. It ran server JavaScript in CGI mode.

JavaScript took a long time to actually make it server-side. First with standalone interpreters (ie. Spidermonkey) and later with a full-fledged runtime and development environment (NodeJS).

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#236

Post by tehlike »

atum47 wrote: post #123

I bought a book, when I was about 12-15 years old, called DHTML (Dynamic HTML). It blew my mind to see things moving across the screen with just code. Keep in mind that I learned pure html when I was 10, my websites were all very static (apart from a animated GIF here and there). The only way you could do a cool menu, effect or animation, was with Java Applet (which I learned after purchasing a online Java course tha…

This is very similar to my exact experience, with ages probably shifted by a year or two, given my site from 1999 shows a javascript alert prompt lol.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#237

Post by bdcravens »

atum47 wrote: post #123

I bought a book, when I was about 12-15 years old, called DHTML (Dynamic HTML). It blew my mind to see things moving across the screen with just code. Keep in mind that I learned pure html when I was 10, my websites were all very static (apart from a animated GIF here and there). The only way you could do a cool menu, effect or animation, was with Java Applet (which I learned after purchasing a online Java course tha…

In the late 90s/early 2000s you'd search (probably with Altavista) for a DHTML script that did a given thing (and often it wouldn't even be that dynamic, and might be something as simple as form validation; "DHTML" was kind of a catch-all phrase)

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#238

Post by bluedino »

toyg wrote: post #162
bluedino wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java is like 3-4 years older than Python.

Python actually was first released in 1991, as James Gosling and friends had just started working on Java, but I can't even remember if python 1.x had classes at all . Java was everywhere pretty much as soon as it landed in 1995, because SUN pushed it like crazy and loads of shops were actually looking for something better than C/C++ for a large number of apps. By the time Python 2.0 was released in 2000, OOP was pre…

Python had objects in Python 1.4, according to documentation released on 25 October 1996. Python.org doesn't have anything older than that on their site.

Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

#240

Post by ethbr0 »

duxup wrote: post #197
ethbr0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications ... has it? ;-) (Note: joke with deference to the huge pool of incredibly talented js developers! But there are still a lot of mind bogglingly terrible js devs too)

Presumably anything popular enough has a good chunk of terrible devs? I'm guessing there are some very unpopular languages out there that the % of highly skilled devs is pretty high, but I don't know if that means much ;)

Curious about the relative areas of esoterica...

Are there bad COBOL developers still practicing? FORTRAN?

What about Ada? Erlang? Smalltalk?

The mainframe families?

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