Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 241 posts

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

#31

Post by scarface74 »

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.

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The first large scale use of AJAX was Microsoft using it in Outlook Mail for the web in 2000.

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

#32

Post by monocasa »

svachalek wrote: post #28
monocasa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I was under the impression that the closure compiler didn't exist in 2004, only GWT, and that it was rewritten to be almost all JS later.

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

#33

Post by projektfu »

I couldn't make heads nor tails of it when it debuted. But I was only 17.

This article brings me back to a time when every product had a bunch of these "empty suit" quotes about it. The person never said that stuff, it was all written for them. I remember being on a project where marketing fluff was "said" by someone who had no idea what was going on and, besides, the product wasn't doing anything, let alone what he claimed the technology enabled it to do.

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

#34

Post by btilly »

JavaScript is a fascinating example of Microsoft successfully getting a giant own goal.

The promise of the web was cross platform applications that required no installation. Microsoft's fear was that cross platform applications would make the operating system irrelevant and reduce Windows lock-in. Both Sun (with Java) and Netscape wanted Microsoft's worst fears to happen.

This was the era of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. So Microsoft embraced the web and added a variety of extensions that only worked on Internet Explorer and Windows. The browser wars followed, which Microsoft resoundingly won.

Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft applications using various Microsoft extensions.

One of those applications was Microsoft Outlook. Which needed to poll the server and find out if there was new mail. For that purpose they wrote the first version of the XmlHttpRequest object. This was in 1999 and they thought nothing more of it...until gmail and then Google Maps came out in 2004 and demonstrated what could be done with it.

The next thing you know, everyone is talking AJAX. Mozilla makes the web accessible to the world. And then Google decided to throw serious energy into a better JavaScript runtime (aka V8) because they wanted to be able to write more sophisticated applications.

And the result is that Microsoft's nightmare has now been realized. But none of it could have happened without that fateful decision to supply the missing piece for a ton of applications of having an asynchronous way to go back for more data without loading another web page.

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

#35

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> didn't work well.

And nearly impossible to debug on top of that. Firebug didn't come around until 2005, and AFAIK that was the first interactive debugger for Javascript. In fact, I remember spending a lot of time debugging without even console.log() support - window.alert() was the only weapon you had for the longest time. Not to mention every Javascript implementation's frustrating habit of just throwing up a blank page instead of an error message if anything was wrong...

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

#36

Post by steego »

dylan604 wrote: post #29
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.

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.

It was used, but mostly for internal applications or websites that were willing to dictate a minimum browser. Firefox was only released in 2002. By 2004, it had hit a critical enough mass that it was reasonable to tell a user they needed as good as IE or Firefox at the time (for a beta project).

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

#37

Post by lowercased »

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.

I seem to remember oddpost.com doing 'Ajax email' pretty significantly in 2002/2003, well before gmail.

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

#38

Post by billziss »

I wrote my first website in 1995 and started using Javascript in 1996 (only I think it was called Livescript back then)?

I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it. (Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!)

My opinion of Javascript has not improved over the years. I worked with Javascript for a while and in complex enough problems that my name ended up on 2-3 patents and patent applications. I no longer work on the web, but I have occasional need for Javascript and I always hate my time with it.

This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant.

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

#39

Post by commandlinefan »

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.

Back then, most all the Javascript you ever saw was client-side form validation. Single-page-apps were still a long way off, so all web apps were built in form submission style: the user fills out some form data, it gets sent to the server, the server tells them they filled it out wrong and re-presents the form to the user. You could make that a little more user-friendly by having Javascript validate the form _before_ the users submitted it: but you had to validate it again on the server side because the user might have Javascript turned off, or might be a hacker. That meant that, for most web developers, Javascript just meant extra work: you had to duplicate your form-validation logic in a very finicky, untestable, untyped programming language. Browser makers were working on adding some flashier stuff like drop-down menus and image rollovers, but they didn’t work across different browsers (all both of them), so even the few people who did know how to use the extensions were encouraged not to. It seemed like everybody who could avoid Javascript did - I can’t really for the life of me understand how the early Javascript developers actually got anything done in it. It was a really painful way to develop software until maybe ten years ago.

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

#40

Post by phillipkang »

billziss wrote: post #38

I wrote my first website in 1995 and started using Javascript in 1996 (only I think it was called Livescript back then)? I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it. (Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!) My opinion of Javascript…

I think the accessibility of web browsers and npm allowed the JavaScript ecosystem to explode, hence it's staying power.
Post reply on HN