A date that will live in infamy.
Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
251–260 of 476 posts
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#252Such a sad day for an industry! In a slightly different turn of events, web software ecosystem perhaps could be different from the pile of hacks on top of hacks it is now.
Java applets? Flash?
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#253I was just thinking the other day about how in late '95 I had just bought my first PC and was teaching myself web development and discovered JavaScript. I remember submitting bug reports to Sun. I hadn't realized until the other day, after calculating the timeline, just how new JavaScript really was at that point in time.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#254it is interesting that the archive.org version of this press release has a semi-colon after AT&T; i can't remember if in 1995 we would write the code to be AT&T or if that came a bit later. perhaps the scraper thought it was an HTML entity starting with the & followed by the T and it added the semi-colon. or maybe it originally was posted in 1995 without the semi-colon and before it got indexed in 2002 by archive…
In the raw version of the archived page, found by adding "id_" after the URL[1], there is no semicolon.
The link to netscape.com at the end is mysteriously missing still, "Additional information on Netscape Communications Corporation is available on the Internet at ,"
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020606002913id_/http://wp.nets...
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#255Not being on the web until the late 90s, the part I've never figured out is, what could you actually _do_ with JavaScript in the initial versions? The way I understand it, early JavaScript could only address HTML forms, links, and images. Can't modify HTML tags. Can't insert new elements. Can't update the page and re-render until DHTML in the version 4 browsers. Can't query the network until XHR. Ok, so now what? Do…
JavaScript was quite limited at that point but then, so was everything else. So by comparison, it actually gave a developer a lot of relative control and power over a page.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#256Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing…
Thanks for clarifying. That said the impression I got at the time is that his motivation to leave appeared closely tied to controversy around his past donations and personal beliefs. Hence the "under present circumstances" statement.
No problem -- it's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.)
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#258I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated. > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterpris…
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…
I think if you combined the two "different" answers to why it's named JavaScript, you get the truth. Yes, it was promoted as a companion scripting language for Java, but that was in part because Java was so hot at the moment, so marketing had something to do with the decision to name it JavaScript.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#259Earlier 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)
There are lots of terrible js devs, because js is easy to start with. I bet most js devs would not be able to make a "hello world" in C. And pointers? What is that? So for those people(not meant in a negative way) it is good that they can use a language to get things done, even if they have no academic background.
Even great JavaScript developers don't have to be able to do C and pointer stuff. This has value, but there are many other things which bring more applicable value.
However there are toooo many "jQuery developers" with no understanding of the underlying things, while JS+libraries enabled them to do quite fancy things.
Re: Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
#260I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated. > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterpris…
Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated.
I once had a boss who thought I could write Java Android apps because I knew Javascript from web development. "They're the same thing, right?"
Lifting a line from somewhere deep in the bowels of the internet, I told him that, "Java is to Javascript as ham is to hamster."
Got fired shortly after that. Company folded a couple of weeks later. Life moves on.