[HN Gopher] Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
___________________________________________________________________
Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)
Author : brandrick
Score : 597 points
Date : 2020-12-04 12:12 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Damn, I was 7 at the time. And by the time I was 17, and just
| starting to build websites, it still felt like Javascript was
| barely a baby.
| k__ wrote:
| I was 10 when it came out and wrote my first line of JS with 18
| or something. It already felt dated to me at that time.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I was....older....when it came out and so wrote my first
| Javascript code around 96. Actually back then it felt like a
| breath of fresh air. A way to run logic in the browser that
| interacted with HTML. Nobody saw it as a replacement to Java
| applets, Flash, Shockwave (anyone remember that plugin and
| Macromedia Director?), etc but it did open the door to make
| basic web pages a little more dynamic.
|
| Some time before 2000 (though I forget which year precisely)
| I even submitted some Javascript to Planet Source Code
| (anyone remember that website?) that simulated a Windows 95
| desktop; complete with interactive start menu and task bar.
| That submission was the highest rated for that month and was
| awarded some free software as a prize -- though I never
| claimed that prize in the end.
|
| It's true that the early days of Javascript was rather
| lacklustre (not helped with the the IE/Netscape wars) and
| thus few people took it seriously as something that could
| displace Java applets nor Flash. But it was still widely used
| as something to make traditional web design a little more
| flexible (eg Javascript refreshes).
|
| Part of my actually misses those days. Web design was simpler
| in some ways (it was predominantly backend generated* HTML
| with JS sprinkled about sparsely). Though I don't miss
| browser incompatibilities -- even basic things like
| displaying a table (not a grid of divs, a literal <table>)
| was fraught with different browsers rendering the table
| differently.
|
| * and in fairness, I was always more of a backend engineer
| rather than frontend designer anyway
| Orthw2020 wrote:
| What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple
| statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!
| mabbo wrote:
| I think they understand the repercussions.
|
| Imagine if you said that the pain and suffering of every
| developer for the last 25 years was largely your fault. There
| would be lawsuits. Class action. We'd all travel to come
| testify.
| krapp wrote:
| >Imagine if you said that the pain and suffering of every
| developer for the last 25 years was largely your fault.
|
| Hyperbole and nonsense. No one was "suffering" under
| Javascript until Node and compile-to-js languages and the
| Byzantine nightmare of a development environment that they
| created came along. No one was shouting "Javascript Delenda
| Est" when all you needed was an FTP account and a text editor
| to configure a JQuery plugin.
|
| I mean, Javascript development used to be reasonably simple,
| straightforward and fun. It's Silicon Valley's fault that it
| no longer is, not the language.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Silicon Valley 's fault_
|
| Personally, I'd lay this at the "copy & paste, boot camp-
| trained" webdevs community's feet, along with their
| customers.
|
| Js has an unfortunate ecosystem dynamic where its primary
| customers (I want to X on the web) don't understand it, so
| its primary developers don't have any standardization
| pressure (fragmentation / spaghetti at the wall), browsers
| are forced to enable this behavior via monkey patching
| standardization in presentation, so its end users (browser
| users) are oblivious to everything under the hood.
|
| It's like the perfect storm of hidden sausage-making.
| Gunax wrote:
| Do you think it would be better if they did understand
| it?
|
| You can be a Java dev for years (forever really) without
| understanding how the JVM works. I don't see why the web
| has to be any different.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| "They" was intended to be the customers: the clients
| paying for development.
|
| Ime, the less visibility and knowledge customers have
| into an implementation, the more opportunity there is for
| developers (especially contract) to go off the rails.
|
| When the code behind "it works in my browser" is
| completely opaque... that doesn't set up the best
| technical incentives in the market. Past "minimize time-
| to-deliver".
| jp555 wrote:
| Struggle sessions were still horrible Maoist actions back then,
| not the "progressive" thing some call for them to be today. :P
| netdur wrote:
| For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini
| extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Web browsers were not invented to be application platforms.
| They were intended to view documents and click through them.
|
| Server-side applications (CGI) started the trend of the web
| browser becoming an application interface. Javascript made
| the web browser the application _platform_. But of course it
| was not designed for this, so a million hacks have been added
| to shore it up. To the point of literally including a
| standard to ship arbitrary binary executable programs into
| it. There used to be another tool and language which allowed
| you to ship arbitrary binary executable programs to remote
| systems... it was called Java.
|
| The Web is the best example in history of how successful turd
| polishing can be. The global economy now rests on it.
| wayneftw wrote:
| > ...not invented to be application platforms.
|
| Phones were invented to only make phone calls.
|
| Coca-Cola was originally created as a way to counter
| morphine addiction.
|
| Listerine was originally a floor cleaner.
|
| None of those were turds and neither is the web as an
| application platform. Quite the opposite- Native apps suck
| compared to web apps. The only native apps I personally use
| besides the browser on my phone are Maps, Messages, Slack,
| Camera/Photos and those are only because there's no other
| choice. Imagine having to use an app instead of popping
| open the web browser to order from Amazon? Yeesh
| grishka wrote:
| > Imagine a world without Javascript?
|
| That would've been a better world. Imagine the web that isn't
| an application platform. (it still isn't, but it's being
| actively shoehorned into becoming one)
| [deleted]
| cesarb wrote:
| > You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh
| gmail
|
| That existed without JavaScript (and IIRC it was somewhat
| common back when JavaScript was a novelty): <meta http-
| equiv="Refresh: 60">
| ptx wrote:
| Periodically tearing down the entire UI while the user is
| in the middle of using it is a terrible user experience.
| TomGullen wrote:
| That's not how it was usually implemented though, you'd
| have frameless iframes that refreshed - eg for chat rooms
| etc
| ptx wrote:
| Did it preserve the scroll position when refreshing? If
| so, that might be OK for a chat room. But an email inbox
| is more interactive, so I think it would be jarring to
| have that refresh as you're poking at it.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| _Imagine a world without Javascript?_
|
| What a dream.
| RobAley wrote:
| Be the change you want to see. Your personal website linked
| to from your HN profile consists solely of a Javascript
| game ... :)
| Jean-Philipe wrote:
| I'd be afraid flash would come back. Ah, those
| flashbacks...
| grishka wrote:
| Flash is better than JS to be honest. JS still hasn't
| caught up with ActionScript. The only bad part about
| Flash is that it's proprietary.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| I would agree that Actionscript 3 as an implementation of
| ECMAscript is more of a delight than JavaScript as a
| language which conforms to whatever version of
| ECMAscript. But compiling to VMs in the browser? Never
| again.
| recursive wrote:
| When flash was focused, my keyboard shortcuts didn't
| work. I hated it just for that.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what language would have replaced
| Javascript in you dream?
| untog wrote:
| This notion always makes me laugh. Which is better, Google
| Maps or the old MapQuest pages that had arrows and reloaded
| the entire page when you wanted to move the map? I know
| which one I prefer.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| If we had a world without Javascript it would probably be
| some nightmare with SaaS companies building their apps in
| Flash or something.
| simias wrote:
| That was called an IMAP client. It was fine.
| anoncake wrote:
| It's still fine.
| [deleted]
| gspr wrote:
| > You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh
| gmail
|
| Why would I ever want to touch a webmail interface with a 3 m
| pole?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the GP was joking.
| ddevault wrote:
| >For what? Imagine a world without Javascript?
|
| What a pleasant way to begin my day. Thank you for this
| moment of bliss.
| viktorcode wrote:
| It was supposed to be Scheme in the browser, not an
| inconsistent typeless error-prone mess.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| Development would be so much faster without JS. It could be
| done in a Flash.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to
| HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| logicchains wrote:
| Its created got fired from his job as CEO for creating it,
| isn't that punishment enough?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Eich wasn't fired for making JS. He was fired because of some
| political donations and opposing same sex marriage.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| happy same sex marriages in California against their
| consent. All of the google results have to do with
| marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?
|
| As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood
| the concept of equality:
| https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716
|
| DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250
| employees while it refocuses ...
|
| Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the
| opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but
| he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite
| history to make an ideological point. It's all very well
| and unambiguously documented what really happened, and
| there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-
| resignat...
|
| Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
|
| A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
|
| "I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and
| leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us,
| and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an
| effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide
| what to do next."
|
| Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
|
| Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
|
| A: No. It was Brendan's idea to resign, and in fact, once
| he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get
| Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.)
| bananaface wrote:
| From a utilitarian perspective, probably not.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| The mother of all sunken costs.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the surface is wide to carry
| _greim_ wrote:
| Apologized because a scripting language is inherently a bad
| idea for the browser, or because it was imperfect?
| [deleted]
| draw_down wrote:
| Almost nothing in this world brings me joy like HN's hatred of
| JavaScript. You all even came around on PHP in the end, which
| just makes it funnier.
|
| Stay mad, guys! :)
| tjansen wrote:
| I assume you have never used VBScript, which was the major
| alternative back then.
| toyg wrote:
| VBScript is actually a later development, in reaction to JS
| (or "DHTML", as we called it back then). But yeah, it was
| pretty bad too.
| icedchai wrote:
| Not by much. VBScript was available with Internet Explorer
| 3.0, which was released in 1996. It was only a little later
| than early JS.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I worked at a computer store/ISP - the owner was a VB guy,
| and coded up some stuff on our intranet in it. I recall his
| shock that it didn't work in Netscape.
| duxup wrote:
| I have trouble imagining all the things folks don't like about
| JavaScript ... not still being a thing if there was something
| else.
| arendtio wrote:
| I wonder how many people rue that day (especially in the HN
| community) ;-)
| lta wrote:
| I cannot express how much I rue this day.
| edub wrote:
| it 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.org someone ran a
| regex style replacement on old static html files at netscape to
| "fix" html entities.
|
| it just doesn't seem likely that a static html file from 1995
| would have had AT&T; in it, it seems more likely that it was
| transformed either by the scraper or some internal script run
| after it was originally posted.
|
| i found an old email version of the press release on Lunds
| University website that does not have the semi-colon.
| http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt
|
| and what looks like an archive of the 1995 version of the java
| website hosted at University of Oviedo:
| http://www6.uniovi.es/java-http/pr951204-03.html
| hcs wrote:
| 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...
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| Does this mean the Wayback Machine has a bug relating to how
| it handles HTML entities?
| jamesdhutton wrote:
| Interesting to read the list of companies in the announcement,
| and to contemplate that JavaScript has outlived most of them.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I wrote my first actually-doing-something lines of code back in
| 2001 in JS, because unlike e.g. Pascal, JS (or actually JScirpt)
| would just run and not ask stupid questions about types or
| missing semicolons and required only a browser.
|
| 12-year-old me was very happy with such a low barrier to entry
| language, especially given that I didn't have an internet
| connection until years later, so I had to learn mostly via trial
| and error.
| tomhoward wrote:
| I didn't realise JS only appeared in late '95.
|
| I first used the web in early-mid '95; it must've been around
| April-May of that year.
|
| I'm no JS-hater, but it's still nice to think I had a brief few
| months of script-free web use before the JS era dawned.
| didip wrote:
| Javascript was such a misopportunity to use Scheme instead.
|
| All three HTML, JS, and CSS could have used one Lisp-like
| dialect.
|
| Also, I remembered that JS was horribly misunderstood for a long
| time because people weren't used to the prototypical inheritance.
| And this is where jQuery comes in and took JS to the next level.
| krapp wrote:
| >All three HTML, JS, and CSS could have used one Lisp-like
| dialect.
|
| Other than being aesthetically pleasing to a demographic of
| programmers, what would be the benefit? Modern sites already
| have a problem with JS being used to generate CSS and HTML, and
| separation of concerns being completely abandoned, and that's
| just created a mess where three separate, more explicit
| languages were simpler.
| Wilem82 wrote:
| Lol god forbid. Browser side programming is shitty enough
| without lisp nonsense.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| 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.
| godot wrote:
| I find the fragmentation interesting. In the mid to late 90s
| when I was first on the internet, the "prominent search
| engines" ranked (given to me by my ISP and some other sites)
| was something like AltaVista, Yahoo, InfoSeek, with Webcrawler
| and Hotbot down at the bottom. I believe my ISP distributed IE
| (3 at the time) with whatever internet software cd they
| included, and it was my first and default browser. Later on I
| tried installing Netscape Navigator, but it felt slow and
| clumsy compared to IE3 at the time, so I never understood why
| anyone used it. It's quite interesting how our internet
| experiences were so different!
|
| What is the same between us however is I also learned coding
| practically by first starting to make HTML pages, and some
| Javascript, and that was also my way into the technical field
| (decade and a half of working as a software engineer now).
| Like, sure, there were computer programming classes in school
| and every class used Pascal at the time (Quick or Turbo). It
| didn't feel like creating anything useful for the real world
| though; whereas with the web, I was immediately creating
| something for the world to see. I'd say learning to make web
| pages on my own was 99% of the reasons I became a software
| engineer later. The programming classes in high school, not so
| much.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Thunderbird debuted as Netscape mail and was combined in
| Netscape Communicator suite I believe. Memory fuzzy.
| cxr wrote:
| Thunderbird came out of the Netscape 6 rewrite by way of the
| Mozilla Application Suite, not either of the Netscape 3 or
| Netscape 4 mail clients.
| smt1 wrote:
| I used Netscape 0.99 on a Mac. It was on a BMUG CD from 1994
| that I would get a lot of freeware/shareware. Used it download
| SPRY Mosaic, which Microsoft licensed to create IE on Win95
| soon after (I had already seen Mosaic running on CDE on HP/UX
| at my mom's scanning electron lab. she was getting a physics
| ph.d). Then I got a Mac clone from Metroworks. It had a pretty
| innovative C++ engine for its' time (PowerPlant), but I ended
| up booting into mkLinux (a mach-based linux) just in time for
| linux 2.0.0, discovering kde, then spending a while trying to
| emulate hacking at khtml/konqueror just to reverse engineer IE
| behavior "quirks" (5+ was a disaster) just to get websites to
| behave. Eventually both Apple and Chromium adopted khtml
| (webkit) instead of Gecko, before Firefox itself revived via
| Netscape and Mozilla (after it escaped the AOL/Time Warner
| fiasco). The funny thing is I use Firefox, chrome (on my
| android), and safari (on my Mac) much more than I use linux
| anymore. I'm pretty luckily to not have been just slightly too
| young (I'm mid 30s) to go after the original .com boom.
|
| I enjoy Rust the days. Modern C++ certainly ain't bad, but
| nostdlib Rust is also the first serious threat to full spectrum
| C in a long time.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| It doesn't have to be this way.
|
| Hopefully Brython[0] which lets you do client-side Python
| scripting takes off.
|
| Imagine doing full stack web dev without seeing a single line of
| JS.
|
| [0] https://brython.info/
| speedgoose wrote:
| I very much prefer modern JavaScript compared to Python. It's
| faster, has a better async support, as powerful, and I don't
| have to care about white space.
| niek_pas wrote:
| Brython has been around for _years_ now and AFAIK has not shown
| any signs of taking off.
|
| I think you're better off placing your bets on newer ECMAscript
| features and full-conversion libraries like React.
| jfoster wrote:
| I love the idea. From experience, though, this type of thing
| becomes a bit painful when you realise that you actually want
| to use some of the tools & code from the javascript world.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's just replacing one passable scripting language with
| another passable scripting language, just with worse
| performance.
|
| I don't see the point.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I think building apps in Rails/Opal is just as likely.
|
| Seriously though, I'm putting a lot of hope in the
| LiveView/Stimulus Reflex/etc approach.
| Kye wrote:
| Think of how the web would be different if Microsoft leaned its
| monopoly power on XMLHttpRequest. Would it have been the test
| case for API ownership instead of Java?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
| toyg wrote:
| XHR is possibly Microsoft's "Xerox PARC" moment. They held the
| future in their hands and it just went through their fingers.
| bdcravens wrote:
| They also had VBScript and ActiveX in IE. I think had they
| held onto XHR it would have gone the same route, and a
| comparable alternative would have been developed.
| victor106 wrote:
| > today announced JavaScript, an open, cross-platform object
| scripting language
|
| Those words "open source" and "cross platform" are still in vogue
| today.
|
| That's just amazing for an industry that changes every year and
| in the land of JS every month.
| evan_ wrote:
| In the beginning JavaScript was created. This has made a lot of
| people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > widely regarded as a bad move.
|
| By who? You? Because there's tens (hundreds) of thousands of
| programmers and thousands of companies working on JavaScript.
| Just because many here consider JavaScript bad doesn't mean
| everyone does. JavaScript has many problems, but it's not
| "widely regarded" as bad.
| evan_ wrote:
| I love JavaScript, I spend 40 hours a week elbow-deep in the
| stuff, I'm just having some fun.
| abruzzi wrote:
| the OP is referencing a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to
| the Galaxy:
|
| "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a
| lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a
| bad move."
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I'm an idiot. I should've picked that out...
| Arnavion wrote:
| (It's a quote from a popular book.)
| [deleted]
| atum47 wrote:
| 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 that was taught over ICQ - it doesn't get more 90's than
| that).
|
| I have this love relationship with javascript ever since I wrote
| my first "alert('hello')" and I wish it a happy birthday with
| many more years to come.
| arendtio wrote:
| It still bothers me when people talk about dynamic HTML these
| days. Just two weeks ago some team lead said it and I thought
| 'dude, that is so 90s'.
| flomo wrote:
| Reminded me of the MS "DHTML Dude" blog. (no longer online,
| it appears.)
| lostcolony wrote:
| It's also probably incorrect; DHTML didn't involve loading
| data via AJAX after the page loaded, but instead configuring
| the webpage on the client side after loading it.
|
| That said, ask them if they'd prefer the backend in PHP or
| Coldfusion.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 1999 saw the release of XMLHttpRequest as an ActiveX
| control for IE 5. There certainly were IE-focused
| developers still referring to most of what they were doing
| as DHTML and yet doing the earliest AJAX stuff, back when
| the X still made sense that it stood for XML and
| XMLHttpRequest was the first and at the time only AJAX tool
| available in a web developer's toolbelt.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Also don't forget about long-polling (long running
| request), or an iframe that refresh itself.
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| As someone who's been making websites since 1993,
| everything you said here has made me twitch in one way or
| another. I've been a ColdFusion team lead, a PHP developer
| and I used to write DHTML scripts.
|
| Also RIP to separation of concerns on the frontend
| (document [html], style [css] and behavior [js]) since it's
| all buried in javascript nowadays.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Sigh. Working in cybersecurity, it makes me sad to see how
| much ColdFusion is still in use, full of security holes
| that no one will fix because the original developers have
| long since moved on and current developers don't want to
| touch anything CF related with a ten foot pole.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Given that Wordpress can be targeted as an API for a SPA
| and Laravel is pretty hot, I'd say PHP isn't a bad choice.
|
| ColdFusion of course is pretty out of vogue, but places
| like Invision like it still.
|
| A better comparison would be with ASP 3 or Perl.
| tehlike wrote:
| 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.
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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)
| bdickason wrote:
| I remember this book! I think it was red with a yellow font
| maybe? Agree with you on the alert('hello') :)
| atum47 wrote:
| Turns out I still have my copy[1]. I remember this guy[2]
| blowing my mind. He would move his arms to a menu, where your
| mouse hover. This whole book was a thrill for me.
|
| 1 - https://imgur.com/a/qMsw11C
|
| 2 - https://imgur.com/a/kZKyhok
| nonesuchluck wrote:
| Not 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 you just pop up an alert() when someone types 4 digits for a
| Zip code instead of 5? Image rollovers? Is that it?
| petercooper wrote:
| Check out the JavaScript newsgroup from 1996 to see what people
| were discussing and trying to achieve :-)
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.javascript/search?q=af...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| One of the big things back then was form validation. Web pages
| in the late 90's were necessarily very form driven (no AJAX
| back then), and users were frustrated to submit a form, wait
| for a response, only to be told that they were missing a
| required input (or as you suggest, 4 digits for zip code). So
| there were complex frameworks to let Javascript validate the
| form before it was submitted - the Struts framework would even
| generate the Javascript for you and keep it synchronized with
| the backend.
|
| But yeah, there wasn't really a whole lot of functionality. You
| _could_ do fancier things with the Layer API in Netscape, but
| it only worked in Netscape.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah wiithout validation form validation still is wonky if
| you want to do it on the browser / client end.
|
| I see so many "you don't need JS" articles that mention some
| of the basic HTML type form field validations and they're
| nice-ish... they're never enough.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Yeah - OTOH, it was a double-edged sword, since you had to
| re-run the same validation on the server side, and you had
| to be careful to make sure they were in sync.
|
| Of course, this brings back painful memories of multiple
| occasions where somebody said, "this is dumb, we already
| validated it on the client side, we don't have to re-
| validate it on the server side" and took out the server-
| side validation (even after I tried in vain to explain to
| them why that was a security hole...)
| duxup wrote:
| It's just hard to avoid the whole two pronged validation
| situation. You just have to accept you're going to do it
| on both ends.
|
| If at all possible I think of client side as "active"
| validation with lots of feedback and such built in. Back
| end is "passive / defensive" where validation is more
| 'nope just not gonna do that'.
|
| Every time I think "let's see how much I can do this on
| the back end" it ends up being kinda wonky, I'm sure it
| is possible but just human interaction type stuff, I like
| it on the front. Security, detailed rules, etc, back.
| cygx wrote:
| You could output HTML via document.write().
| sodapopcan wrote:
| ...and don't forget pre-loading images! We didn't have CSS
| :hover back then and had to resort to image swaps for fancy
| hover effects in menus :)
| gmac wrote:
| As I recall you could do what felt like quite a lot by abusing
| image swapping and frames + document.write.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| 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.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| Remainder of how hard is realizing you're witnessing history.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| ... and still looks like it hasn't aged a day in some ways.
|
| https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something...
| severak_cz wrote:
| opening via right click to private window works
| hrafn wrote:
| Note that the above link cannot be opened by clicking on it,
| the site redirects away request with a HackerNews referrer. Can
| still be opened by copying-and-pasting.
| [deleted]
| echeese wrote:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
| cies wrote:
| Not my fav announcement. This funny (I think) video shows why:
| https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
|
| Disclaimer: I like types, I hate automatic casting.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| It is wild to revisit some of the inspiration of the kind of
| weaponized cynicism that hopefully we're getting away from.
| This talk was funny for sure, but it started a large amount of
| "computers are awful, look at what this stupid thing did" which
| was very harmful. Not because it isn't true, but because
| understanding why and how these things happen, dealing with and
| educated people surrounding these things, and trying to make
| things better is the goal (perhaps misplaced) of many in the
| industry. It is incredibly easy to just shit on things.
|
| Still a pretty funny talk for sure.
| brk wrote:
| I recall being at a local (Detroit) IT seminar around the time
| Javascript was announced, and some guy from Sun with an English
| accent going on and on about how safe javascript would be, since
| it couldn't access local resources and they had purposefully left
| out a lot of functions that could compromise the user. It's
| changed a bit since then, I'd say.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| Being limited but safe may be the reason that JavaScript has
| won out over Java. As I recall, applets turned out to be a
| security nightmare.
| krapp wrote:
| Also, Javascript didn't require a compiler, and Java applets
| were notoriously slow.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm not sure JavaScript was any faster than Java at the
| time.
|
| I blame the failure of Java applets on Microsoft who
| deliberately undermined them.
| toyg wrote:
| JS was definitely faster, but it wasn't really used it in
| a modern sense anyway - just simple animations.
|
| MS definitely had a lot to do with Java applets failing
| though; after SUN fought to avoid being
| embraced/extinguished by VisualJ++, MS just pushed their
| own ActiveX tech to do the same thing, which was
| inevitably more performant (because it was based on COM+
| and other Windows-specific innards).
| cesarb wrote:
| It was faster. A page with JavaScript loaded instantly, a
| page with Java locked up the whole browser for around a
| minute while the JVM started. (That was probably also the
| start of the "Java is slow" meme: anyone who had ever
| visited a page with a Java applet immediately learned to
| associate "Java" with "slow".)
| meed2000 wrote:
| Applets suffered a spin up of the mini VM time. And
| applets couldn't affect the rendering of the html page,
| they had their own 'canvas'.
|
| I rather think JS was more appropriate as dev found more
| use in dynamically altering the very html markup that
| users saw, and after it was actually rendered.
| toyg wrote:
| Nah, Java applets lost because of the deployment nightmare
| they had become after MS was blocked in their attempt to
| coopt the language (they were barred from shipping
| incompatible JVMs, so they stopped shipping JVMs and Java
| IDEs altogether).
|
| ActiveX was winning, but _that_ really was a security
| nightmare.
|
| Eventually enough of the useful parts of ActiveX crept into
| JS enough to build real stuff with it.
| specialist wrote:
| 20/20: Java applets needed better integration, access to
| the host browser's runtime. Like accessing the current
| page's DOM, being able to hook the event loop.
|
| I didn't care at the time. I hated all things HTML, CSS,
| JS. Such a downgrade from state of the art. I regarded the
| browser as terrible means to deliver, bootstrap applets.
| Just like Flash.
|
| One thing I didn't appreciate at the time was the genius of
| HTTP and URLs.
|
| I'm still completely baffled by the "worse is better"
| thesis. I just can't understand why JavaScript was created,
| much less why it succeeded.
|
| One can understand how mistakes like \0 terminated strings
| and SQL's NULL happen, become hard to undo. But JavaScript
| is the original sin that just keeps poisoning. Other
| platforms, ecosystems learn and grow and mature. JavaScript
| stubbornly refuses to acknowledge truth and goodness, and
| is all the more successful for it's belligerence.
|
| Amazing.
| xtracto wrote:
| And Flash... I think a lot of the _commercial_ use cases
| that Java was supposed to enable were actually filled by
| Flash.
| fuoqi wrote:
| I wonder in how many billions of dollars future generations will
| apprise this mistake.
| Reedx wrote:
| Enough billions to make up trillions.
| hokumguru wrote:
| Apparently this project was started the week that I was born,
| nice.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I love how the company contacts at the end include so many phone
| numbers, only a few email addresses, and zero urls.
| samstave wrote:
| in 1997 Iworked at the first firm that adopted XML
|
| Was on a conf call with VPs from Sun, and i said, and I quote
| myself:
|
| "So youre telling me that you have this shitty b2b system that
| youre not happy with and you want us to implement XML to
| accomodate"
|
| and this VP was nixing it the whole time iwth "hand cut across
| the neck" manurisms...
|
| later I hired Dave Sifry - and had his team implement a b2b FTP
| between us and sun...
|
| I later went to him and stated " You should really make a linux
| support company"
|
| Linuxcare was founded, worth unicorn.
|
| I got nothing
| sradman wrote:
| > JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed
| for creating live online applications that link together objects
| and resources on both clients and servers.
|
| This one document certainly captures the state of the software
| industry before it was transformed by the Web (then Mobile then
| Cloud). The vision of JavaScript being both server-side and
| "isomorphic" is clearly articulated but it was a convoluted road
| getting there.
|
| Let's credit Google's V8 and Node.js for making performant and
| concurrent/evented JavaScript ubiquitous. Netscape/Sun,
| Microsoft, and Sybase abandoned their server-side JavaScript
| efforts for Java/.net bytecode. Microsoft was the only relevant
| browser until Firefox rose from the flames like a phoenix. Linux
| and OSS software killed or maimed most of the companies
| mentioned.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Precisely the same time I used to think JS was a lighter version
| of the Java language.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this
| terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an
| integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent
| scripting language for web browsers _JAVA_ script truly
| demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of
| computing (at least the corporate side).
| Kototama wrote:
| For a starter, having no integer types and non-symmetric
| comparison operators looks technically wrong to me.
| codeulike wrote:
| Java was the most buzzwordy thing imaginable back then.
| Everything was Java Java Java
| bluedino wrote:
| "By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power
| of Java"
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/01/12/by-installing-
| java...
| chromanoid wrote:
| Well I don't know if you are joking, but back then it was the
| other way around. They put Java into JavaScript to pitch
| JavaScript... I guess it worked almost too good...
| toyg wrote:
| It was actually a fairly exciting time...? OOP had really just
| broken into the mainstream (with Java, the first OOP to really
| take off) and would go on to become ubiquitous, spawning tons
| of little new languages (including Python). There were multiple
| vendors pushing VB-like products, some arguably better than MS
| itself, giving high levels of productivity (who some argue have
| never been achieved since). PCs had dramatically democratized
| access, now anyone could build their own tools without having
| to beg for server time, and sysadmin on Windows was so loose
| that one could typically get away with anything (yes, virus bad
| etc etc, but it was still a fun ride). Desktops had just become
| a standard feature of every white-collar job and everyone was
| busy trying to make sense of them; the smart folks made
| millions selling line-of-business apps. And then the internet
| arrived and everything had to be re-done as web-based (hello
| Perl and ASP), _plus_ tons of intranet portals that were
| horrible to use but fun to make, so to speak.
|
| Maybe it's because I was 20 back then, but there was a sense of
| fun and exploration in most computing that is somewhat missing
| in this age of smart-everything, JS-everywhere, and total
| surveillance.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I agree with you, it really was exciting. It was almost like
| the opposite of the "Everything is awesome and no one is
| happy" time we're living in now?
|
| Everything was awful, and everyone was happy. Remember being
| super excited the first time you saw an animated GIF!? Or you
| could mouse-over a picture and there would be a popup that
| said "hey don't touch my face"! Everything was slow and
| crashed all the time, but it was new and really interesting
| and fun. People were just figuring things out, and the new
| stuff that was coming out was amazing at the time. Everything
| was getting faster and better, but damn, it was hard to get
| anything done.
| anentropic wrote:
| > Everything was awful, and everyone was happy.
|
| Totally this!
|
| Not sure if times were actually different, or it's just
| that I was young then...
| krapp wrote:
| I literally remember the day in my school library when I
| found out framesets were a thing and it blew my mind that
| _this part_ of the webpage could move independently from
| _that part._ And no one even uses framesets anymore.
|
| And you're right - nowadays we can stream video, audio,
| games, compile and run code from numerous languages right
| in the browser, and the web has more interesting and rich
| content than ever, but everyone is mad because that means
| the web has moved beyond their childhoods and gotten
| complicated with time.
| toyg wrote:
| _> everyone is mad because that means the web has moved
| beyond their childhoods_
|
| There is a bit of that, but there is also a realization
| that we probably did not really _need_ most of these
| "advancements".
| krapp wrote:
| Arguably, the web doesn't _need_ to be anything but a
| simulation of paper documents connected with hyperlinks,
| but if it had stayed that way, the world would have been
| denied a great deal of creative and cultural expression
| in other media (including code.) For all its faults, both
| in the language and the ways that it 's been implemented,
| Javascript on the web launched a revolution in writing
| and publishing code akin to what the Gutenberg press did
| for text.
| bluedino wrote:
| Java is like 3-4 years older than Python.
| toyg wrote:
| 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 pretty much a requirement for anything,
| and I'm pretty sure that had classes. Python didn't reach
| popularity in the mainstream until the late '00s anyway.
| bluedino wrote:
| 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.
| icedchai wrote:
| You may have that backwards. The first releases of Python
| happened in the early 90's.
| bluedino wrote:
| Ah - that's what I meant to post.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Ok granted, it was not all bad :) For me the mid-90's were
| traumatic because it was a transition from Amiga to PC (just
| before Win95 arrived), which was like being thrown from a
| bright Star Trek future back into the stone age. Also the
| dream of building applications from reusable components led
| to horrors like CORBA, COM and DDE.
| pmarin wrote:
| web _ASSEMBLY_ is not much better name.
| k__ wrote:
| Maybe we get WASM CPUs in the future, haha.
| x86ARMsRace wrote:
| Well, HTML5 super computers are the future.
| usrusr wrote:
| Well, the next regularly scheduled Apple ISA switch is
| expected to be finished no later than 2035...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Why wait when you can bring back Jazelle for WebAssembly?
| mrlala wrote:
| Eh, the thing is until you said that it _never_ occurred to
| me. However before I started to ever really code in the web
| world I was always wondering if javascript was really like a
| semi-java hack on the web or whatever.
|
| Everyone knows that we are so far removed from assembly that
| it creates zero confusion in reality.. javascript caused real
| confusion.
| pmarin wrote:
| I allways though the name was an intended pun.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Haha indeed, it could be worse though: JavaAssembly ;)
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM
| tootie wrote:
| In ye olden dayes, building big, interactive experiences on the
| web wasn't possible without Java (or ActiveX). Even the first
| iteration of JavaScript couldn't interact with the live DOM and
| CSS hadn't come into being yet. It was a sincerely held belief
| by technology professionals (myself included) that a desktop UI
| platform was the only way to deliver rich experiences over the
| internet. And honestly it may have to come to pass if the early
| versions of Swing weren't so slow and ugly.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| My preference is still for something akin to the original
| LiveScript or HyperScript.
| overkill28 wrote:
| I 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 enterprise networks or the Internet is
| virtually unlimited.
|
| Was this level of integration ever achieved? Did Java applets
| actually have a JS API? Or is this just corporate double speak.
| makecheck wrote:
| There is a JavaScript interpreter built in to Java (or more
| than one, in that you could choose at least one older one at
| the time I tried it). I used this for a fairly complex app and
| found it surprisingly easy to let it parse JavaScript and
| affect the Java program, moving data back and forth.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There is a JavaScript interpreter built in to Java
|
| Are you referring to Nashorn? If so, wouldn't "was" be the
| correct verb, not "is"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashorn_(JavaScript_engine)
| valw wrote:
| When you're in the business of sneaking in a Scheme-inspired
| language into the universal programming platform in a world of
| object-oriented dogma, you'd better add some camouflage ;)
|
| And so the language was compromised in its name, and arguably
| in its syntax and (lack of) macro system.
| hathym wrote:
| That is why it was renamed to ECMAScript
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| Marketing. Java was The Next Big thing and they wanted to jump
| on board that bandwagon. The direct integration wasn't very
| common but a lot of the JavaScript objects had similar names
| (toString, etc.) and JS was commonly explained as a sort of
| junior relationship.
|
| Edit: expanding my not very common claim -- I first started
| using JavaScript when it was called LiveScript in Netscape
| betas, the second non-static website I built was Java (using
| DB/2 on OS/2 -- I sure could pick winners!), and I worked at a
| web development company until 2001. During that time, you'd
| commonly hear about Java (along with Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion,
| and even C++) and we used JavaScript heavily but I never once
| met a client who was actually using server-side JavaScript
| although they certainly existed.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| It's very odd, if someone nowadays called their language
| CSharpScript, they'd get slapped with a C&D
| m_st wrote:
| According to the interview with Eich linked above: "Bill
| Joy at Sun was the champion of it, which was very helpful
| because that's how we got the name." Sure helps :-)
| astura wrote:
| Netscape had permission from Sun to use the "Java" name, it
| was a partnership.
|
| This press release itself even says it in the first
| sentence
|
| >Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: NSCP) and Sun
| Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW), today announced
| JavaScript
| acdha wrote:
| This was voluntary. You have to remember that at the time
| the residing hype kings were the so-called 4GLs (e.g.
| Clarion, Clipper, PowerBuilder) and things like Visual
| Basic, Pascal (Delphi), etc. so Sun and Netscape were
| trying to present this as the pair of languages which you
| used to build the web, which was already emerging as the
| white-hot new thing starting to transform the world.
| ajuc wrote:
| Such a shame Clipper and Delphi didn't worked out.
|
| In early 90s my uncle (now 60 years old electrical
| engineer) taught himself clipper from 0 (no programming
| background whatsoever, and no English language) and wrote
| a software for capturing and analysing temperature curves
| of polymer ovens at a factory where he works that is
| still used to this day. They keep a DOS PC just to run it
| :)
|
| I don't think it's possible to do this with modern
| programming technology, there's too many layers of
| abstraction and unrelated asides blocking people from
| "just making it work".
| pjmlp wrote:
| Delphi is still around, and there is a striving community
| in Germany, big enough to keep conferences and magazines
| going.
|
| But yeah, Borland really messed up.
| 725686 wrote:
| My older brother still maintains clipper code that is
| used in production.
| hajile wrote:
| Everything was fine because Sun owned the Javascript
| trademark.
|
| Oracle now owns that trademark today
|
| https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseType=SERIAL
| _...
|
| For what it's worth, Microsoft lost a lawsuit over their
| Java clone called J. Their Javascript clone was called
| JScript.
|
| They made .net and C# instead and probably would have tried
| to make a new web language except that there was no room.
| One could argue that that VB.net was that language to some
| degree.
| ojosilva wrote:
| In fact Microsoft had their own browser scripting
| language, called VBScript. It was released in 1996 and
| only ran (runs) on Internet Explorer browsers (client-
| side) and Windows as an interpreter (Wscript.exe).
|
| I ended-up using it extensively for a period of time from
| 1998 to 2002 to automate webpages that only ran in the
| intranet. I also used Wscript to run certain OLE or ODBC
| based automation (ie. grab data from Excel and write to a
| file) that was clunky to write in Perl.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Now look at what's become of Sun's trademarked logo:
|
| Zuckerberg's not-so-subtle message to Facebook employees:
| Don't end up like Sun Microsystems
|
| Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put a pretty hefty
| reminder for Facebook employees to keep striving for
| relevancy right outside the front door. An aging Sun
| Microsystems sign, on the back side of the Facebook sign,
| is a well-placed message to them.
|
| https://www.geekwire.com/2014/zuckerbergs-not-subtle-
| message...
| bluedino wrote:
| Nobody outside of developers knows what C# is, though.
|
| Java was one of the biggest buzzwords of the late 90's.
| identity0 wrote:
| That's true, it's more like naming your language
| "BlockchainScript". I could totally see someone doing
| that today.
| JackFr wrote:
| "Scrypto"
| cozzyd wrote:
| I just checked and bitcoinscript.org seems to be owned by
| a domain parker.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Bitcoin already has a script (it's what transactions are
| made of) so that's not unexpected.
| jen20 wrote:
| scripts [1] suggests this has not been the case!
|
| [1]: https://github.com/scriptcs/scriptcs
| flowerlad wrote:
| Remember, Sun needed Netscape to make Java successful.
| Today Java is a server-side technology, but that's not how
| it started its life. Java started its life as a technology
| to build more powerful web pages (using embedded applets).
| Sun needed Netscape to bundle Java into its browser. So if
| Netscape wanted to leverage the hype that existed around
| Java at that time then Sun had to let them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They also needed Oracle and IBM, their two major partners
| in the early Java days.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Java started its life as a technology to build more
| powerful web pages
|
| I'm pretty sure Java came from the work James Gosling did
| on Oak, which was mostly used for embedded systems. I
| remember a lot of the early documentation being OO
| designs for devices like microwaves and CD players.
| flowerlad wrote:
| > _I 'm pretty sure Java came from the work James Gosling
| did on Oak, which was mostly used for embedded systems._
|
| Yes, when it was conceived it was indeed intended for
| embedded systems but when it was released it was intended
| as a tech for building client-side smarts into web pages.
|
| Java was originally conceived as Sun's response to
| General Magic's intelligent agent technology. Microsoft's
| response to General Magic was Microsoft Bob, because they
| saw General Magic's social interface as a threat to
| Windows.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Sun was literally in on it though?
|
| So it'd be like if whoever was announcing this hypothetical
| C#Script was doing so together with Microsoft..
| nickbauman wrote:
| Yeah it was called Live Connect and it was pretty amazing. It's
| long since gone though.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/LiveCon...
|
| FWIW as a Clojure/Script developer this technology would have
| been kind of mind-bending if it still existed.
| astura wrote:
| 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 make it a complementary
| scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.
|
| >[The idea of an accessable scripting language] was very
| strongly held by Marc Andreessen and myself. Bill Joy at Sun
| was the champion of it, which was very helpful because that's
| how we got the name. And we were pushing it as a little brother
| to Java, as a complementary language like Visual Basic was to
| C++ in Microsoft's language families at the time.
| derefr wrote:
| 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?
| smt1 wrote:
| It's too bad JVM happened. Solaris was innovative before
| Java, which became monetized primarily by the fees. They
| released Self, SmallTalk, and Squeak before that. I think
| the latter is still very innovative today, because of it's
| Morphic interface (it's category theoretic). I think you
| could teach kids the computational equivalent of pretty
| high level mathematical physics, which is pretty
| interesting relative to other standard CS101 intros (like
| python, etc). TeleScript, which was basically inverse JVM
| was also made around this time, it would have been
| interesting if the Newton hadn't been discontinued:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langu
| a...
|
| These days, ironically, Telescript is a model for how
| distributed computation works in the 3rd world, and even in
| the first world. But Telescript basically would have made
| the lattice structures more hybridizable to project
| information and jobs within the context of already existent
| social networks and maybe provided a better nexus for
| useful work done vs power given up (it was made on a very
| astute observation about the energy, work, power, time,
| information, transmission nexus) before anyone named a
| "peer to peer network", a distributed consensus protocol,
| or introduced money into the picture.
| ojosilva wrote:
| 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).
| derefr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Sure, but that's not an argument against JavaScript
| having potentially been a planned part of the JVM
| ecosystem (or, at least, a language playing a _role_ in
| the JVM ecosystem, without itself being hosted on the
| JVM, instead maybe interacting with the JVM through some
| kind of IPC or FFI bridge.)
|
| Remember, Sun used to be trying to squeeze the JVM into
| web browsers as well, in the form of Java applets. But we
| never saw any real ability to script against these
| applets. "Java applet 'engines' under JavaScript
| control", could have been the portable equivalent to
| "ActiveX components under JavaScript control."
|
| You know how modern games involve 1. a self-contained
| game engine written in C++ or C#, plus 2. the game itself
| being mostly Lua scripting? If Sun had pushed harder, we
| could have seen something like that in 1995, with web
| browsers running JavaScript-scripted games calling into
| Java game engines; long before we got equivalent HTML5
| APIs like Canvas.
|
| Probably, if the world had gone down that path, we would
| have seen JavaScript gradually moving "into" the JVM; and
| the JVM gradually coming to take the position that the
| JavaScript engine takes in modern web browsers.
| zepto wrote:
| You actually could script against applets, it was just
| incredibly clunky and slow, and so not worth it.
| [deleted]
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Sun had some great people and some good ideas and products,
| but as a coherent business it was a rolling train wreck.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Sun had an unhealthy Microsoft obsession. When I was a
| senior in college, Microsoft came to campus and gave a
| two hour presentation on why we should work at Microsoft.
| About a month later Sun came to campus and gave a two
| hour presentation on why we should not work at Microsoft.
| Sun workstations were very common in our engineering
| program so we were ripe for the picking but Sun never
| explained to us what was so great about working for them.
| Well, except for one absolutely ridiculous video clip of
| Scott McNealy standing on the roof of Sun HQ, playing the
| electric guitar. Eyes were rolling out of everyone's
| heads upon seeing that.
|
| Looking back at interviews and industry articles from
| that era, there is a common theme of Sun hating
| Microsoft. Lots of companies and people hated Microsoft
| but Sun seemed to make it their central ideology. As a
| result, they took their eye off of making great
| technology that customers could use to solve their
| problems. It's a pity because they were so far ahead of
| the game at that point that they could have developed
| into something wonderful instead of being absorbed by
| Oracle, with little trace left besides Java sleepwalking
| through the modern era.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Sun had an unhealthy Microsoft obsession._
|
| I think basically everyone did back then. There was a
| pervasive understanding that if you were small enough,
| Microsoft would use underhanded business practices to
| crush you if you became a threat. If you made a
| compelling product, Microsoft would clone it and use
| their might to make it win.
|
| It felt like taking a pottery class with a grizzly bear
| in the room. Really hard to be like, "I should just make
| the prettiest bowl I can" when you know at a moment's
| notice your head might be swiped off.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Which why they sadly ended up digested by Oracle.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only after Google sent a couple of torpedoes and then
| went as if it wasn't their business.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| What torpedoes do you mean?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Android and ripping Sun off.
|
| Then they were hoping that no one would buy them, not
| even themselves cared to own Java after their trick.
|
| So now they push Kotlin, while researching Fuchsia, and
| keep a bunch of lawyers quite happy.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| So implementing and pushing Java in Android was a torpedo
| against Sun?
|
| Interesting logic.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Android Java is not Java, and yes when I take someone's
| product and don't pay what the license specifies, while
| introducing an incomplete implementation, that is 100%
| ripping off.
|
| Thankfully we are going to have that settled in the near
| future, and then Android folks can party all night long
| with their Kotlin implementation and rename ART into KVM.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUN) hereby grants to you a
| fully-paid, nonexclusive, nontransferable, perpetual,
| worldwide limited license (without the right to
| sublicense) under SUN's intellectual property rights that
| are essential to practice this specification. This
| license allows and is limited to the creation and
| distribution of clean room implementations of this
| specification that...[list of requirements]
|
| AFAICT the whole fight is over API's and not "don't pay
| what the license specifies" as they give you the ability
| to do a clean-room implementation without paying
| royalties.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Despite dalvic and co. it still pushed the Java
| ecosystem, right?
|
| Not what I would call a tornado in the meaning pf
| destruction.
|
| And about the license, well, it is disputed, right? I
| only read about it tangential, but the case seemed far
| from crystal clear to me.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As much as Microsoft did with J++.
|
| No one needs Android Java slowing down the Java ecosystem
| by imposing additional burdens on Java library authors
| that also want to target Android.
|
| Besides Google that is.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Implementing it from scratch as a skunkworks reverse
| engineering project designed to never need to pay license
| fees upstream.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Despite the license allowing clean room reverse
| engineering? Sun kindof shot themselves in the foot with
| those words.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Where on the license? Please.
|
| It explicitly only allowed the use of JavaSE on desktop
| deployments, OpenJDK was yet to be made available.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I mean... if we took this version of the narrative at
| face value, I guess we'd all have been better off with no
| Compaq and hence no commodity PC clones.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Definitely, I miss Amiga, Atari, Acorn and friends, which
| Apple is the only surviving one.
|
| I was the only PC guy on my gang, and that was just due
| to other factors not commodity.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Sun had some great people and some good ideas and
| products, but as a coherent business it was a rolling
| train wreck.
|
| I had an internship at Sun in 2002. I distinctly remember
| a town-hall meeting hosted by Johnathan Schwartz (CTO at
| the time, later to be CEO) where an engineer asked
| something to the effect of "this all sounds great, but
| how does this actually make us money?" The engineer was
| told in no uncertain terms that he shouldn't ask such
| questions, that he should focus on engineering and that
| he should trust that other people would handle the money
| side.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I think part of the original goal was for apps to be
| written as Java applets and JavaScript use to bridge
| between HTML and the applets.
| calibas wrote:
| 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.
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| Why "script" though? Aren't Java and JavaScript both
| script(ing languages)?
|
| Why not call it e-Java or Java XYZ or something?
| calibas wrote:
| This is all semantics, but the idea was that Java is a
| "real" language for serious use and JavaScript is a
| "script" that's much easier to use and doesn't involve
| all the complications of a "real" programming language.
|
| It was only kind of true back then, and not even remotely
| true now. There really isn't a solid line you can draw
| between a "script" and a "programming language". To me,
| something like Python is right in between.
| mlyle wrote:
| To me, if something acts logically like it is run from
| top to bottom, it's a scripting language. Python scripts
| and JavaScript are in this category; Java isn't.
|
| Additionally, explicit compilation/linking/assembly
| shouldn't be required for a scripting language, even if
| the interpreter does stuff kind of like this behind the
| scenes for performance.
| zepto wrote:
| That makes Ocaml and Haskel into scripting languages.
| kccqzy wrote:
| You can't just put `putStrLn "Hello"` in the top level of
| a Haskell program and expect it to work. You can do it in
| a REPL, but that's besides the point.
| zepto wrote:
| Sure. I was responding to this:
|
| "To me, if something acts logically like it is run from
| top to bottom, it's a scripting language."
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I feel like "requires compilation" is a good first order
| differentiator. And "has a somewhat sane type system" is
| another.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| tcc is fast enough to run C code (or langs targeting C)
| as scripts.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Well, C++ can be interpreted (sort of, see CINT) and can
| certainly be semi-transparently jitted (see cling).
| Although it's certainly not designed for that!
| wwright wrote:
| Templates are turing complete and universally interpreted
| AFAIK (I don't think any implementation compiles them
| before evaluation?). There's also features like constexpr
| these days.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| C# 9 added "top level statements" which seems to be the
| first steps towards usage in a script environment.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-
| new/csh...
| vlunkr wrote:
| > There really isn't a solid line you can draw between a
| "script" and a "programming language"
|
| I think it's easier to draw the line if you have the
| requirements right. That's not the line that was being
| drawn. it was scripting vs compiled languages. It was
| very clear then which sides Java and Javascript fell on.
| There are some weird cases now like compiling scripts
| into different scripts, but in general it's pretty clear,
| and Python is definitely a scripting language.
| calibas wrote:
| The great "script vs programming language debate". The
| difference is clear to you because you have a clear
| definition in your mind. The problem is that the
| definition changes depending on who you talk to, which
| invites endless debate.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Well it's a pretty bad debate if people aren't agreeing
| on definitions. Hence this whole chain of comments.
| mlyle wrote:
| How could one consider Java a scripting language? It's
| compiled to .class files, has no reasonable
| interactivity, strict structure enforced upon the code,
| etc. E.g. the antithesis of what makes us call something
| a scripting language in basically every category.
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| So Java _Script_ meant "complement to Java, but
| converted to machine language in the browser, instead of
| compiled?"
|
| (Thank you, genuine question)
| mlyle wrote:
| JavaScript is "logically" run line by line from the
| beginning of the script. This may not be exactly true
| anymore for performance reasons, but it's the logical
| model behind it. A single set of expressions to run in
| order "a=1+1;" is a conformant JavaScript script; hence,
| it's a scripting language. It doesn't take much
| imagination about how to have a JavaScript console that
| operates interactively from user input.
|
| Java code has lots of structure required to write a
| minimal program. Java is transformed by compilation into
| a set of .class files. Then, in turn, a loader loads,
| resolves all the classes, and begins transforming and
| executing code.
|
| These distinctions can be muddy sometimes.
| gpvos wrote:
| More like interpreted rather than compiled. (I'm pretty
| sure a google search on "interpreted versus compiled"
| will get you up to speed with the basics on this point.)
| This is generally seen as one of the main differences
| between "scripting" and "serious" languages.
|
| The twist is that the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is also
| a kind of interpreter, but can do on-the-spot ("just-in-
| time") compilation of parts of the code as well.
| pan69 wrote:
| > So JavaScript meant "complement to Java
|
| The whole JavaScript thing was just marketing. In 1995,
| Java was THE hottest thing so associating it with Java
| might fuel adoption/acception.
|
| There is an old saying; Java is to JavaScript what Car is
| to to Carpet.
|
| Re. your compiled question. It's up to the browser on how
| to execute JavaScript. E.g. Chrome has the V8 engine.
| This is the VM that compiles and executes JavaScript
| within Chrome. Other browsers might have different
| engines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)
| hi41 wrote:
| Sorry I am not an expert in Java, but doesn't the jvm
| execute the .class files like bash would execute the .sh
| scripts.
| layer8 wrote:
| Class files contain compiled bytecode, not source code
| like shell scripts do. "Script" implies human-readable
| source code. Java bytecode is binary, a kind of portable
| machine language.
| hi41 wrote:
| Does this mean java .class falls in the middle of scripts
| and native executables? Is this analogy correct? For
| example, I think of native executable as Microsoft Word
| where you can doubleclick and launch it. Whereas with
| .class you have to run it on top of a jvm.
| mlyle wrote:
| Often even a "native" executable is opened by something
| like the ELF interpreter, relocated, etc. Yes, a JVM is a
| lot more heavyweight than these services, but...
| pwdisswordfish4 wrote:
| No. If you must insist on thinking of them as distinct
| from native executables, then consider them foreign
| executable instead--object files written for a different
| machine architecture and a different loader convention.
| There's really no middle ground they're occupying.
| mlyle wrote:
| This is a very good way to put it.
|
| The super pedant in me, of course, would say they're a
| sliver in the middle because they're targeted at running
| in a software-implemented VM instead of on a real machine
| architecture, and that this isn't all that different from
| in-memory interpreter bytecode or something like a .pyc
| written to disk...
|
| But then something like the more complicated loaders for
| native executables is a sliver in the middle, too. And
| then you look at something like the AS/400 with super-
| high level "instructions" and these distinctions get
| super, super muddy.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not exactly. For one, class files are just components of
| a program, so more akin to .o or .so files, not
| executables. That set aside, they are binaries for a
| virtual machine, the JVM. One difference to real machines
| is that the bytecode doesn't have access to untyped
| memory and to the hardware (not even "virtual" hardware),
| and some instructions have more complex semantics than
| you usually have in real hardware, but otherwise it's not
| so much different from actual machine code. Overall it's
| closer to native than to script, and therefore I wouldn't
| quite say that it's in the "middle".
| mlyle wrote:
| Of course, there's murky things like Python which make
| bytecode compiled forms behind the scene.
|
| But there's a lot of magic involved in transforming Java
| to class files, and then there's a lot of further magic
| in resolving, loading, and eventually executing classes.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| PHP does the same. It's compiled to a bytecode before
| execution. But I don't think it's cached anywhere like
| Python (but that may have changed in the decade since
| I've used it)
| meibo wrote:
| PHP has had an OPCache as an add-on since 5.1.0(around
| 2004), and by default since 5.5.0:
| https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.opcache.php
| cubano wrote:
| It better be cached or else that would be a total
| tradegy... why wouldn't you automatically want to cache
| the prerendered pages whenever possible?
|
| It's not like writing a basic cache is very hard...or
| just "borrow" one from an OS implementation.
| nostoc wrote:
| A scripting language is generally thought as a language
| suitable for quick easy project, less so for large scale
| software engineering. Verbosity of syntax, compilation,
| presence of boilerplate code, static typing are all
| things that make java unattractive as a scripting
| language.
|
| Java is great at what it does, which is not scripting.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I've never seen Java called a scripting language before,
| actually.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Not supposed to talk about Bill Joy hes not a gazillionaire
| eCeleb
| blakesterz wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| "JavaScript would have been the ideal name because that's
| what everyone called it and that's what the books call it.
| Microsoft couldn't get a license from Sun so they called
| their implementation JScript. So ECMA wanted to call it
| something and they couldn't get anybody to donate or they
| couldn't get everybody to agree to a donation of the
| trademark, so they ended up inventing ECMAScript, which
| sounds a little like a skin disease. Nobody really wants it.
| "
| hi41 wrote:
| As a new developer in early 2000, I couldn't tell the
| difference between Java and JavaScript. I felt very ashamed of
| that.
| andi999 wrote:
| Especially when you couldnt even google it (the other search
| engines never found anything related to my keywords...)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| Rompect wrote:
| I always use "Java is to Javascript as a car is to carpet"
| but yours is also good.
| Azleur wrote:
| Marketing move. Same reason they shoehorned constructors into a
| prototype based language. Java was all the rage in '95.
| everlost wrote:
| The biggest irony is that they believed Javascript
| "complemented" Java!
| stephenhuey wrote:
| As others in this discussion have pointed out, Sun intended
| this because they wanted people to see Java as the server
| side language so even though applets could run Java in the
| browser they never did much to improve performance because
| they expected people to rely on JavaScript in the browser
| (and buy their expensive servers to run Java).
| robbrown451 wrote:
| They aren't really unrelated as they explicitly made JavaScript
| syntax "look like Java" which in turn "looked like C and C++".
|
| This also helped with their LiveConnect stuff which allowed the
| two to talk to each other. I think it was a huge selling point
| that the languages felt similar, and felt comfortable to those
| who already knew C and/or C++.
|
| In those days I was doing a lot of pasting from one language to
| the other, and editing "int" into "var" etc. Java and
| JavaScript were similar in that, compared to C and C++, you
| just sort of forgot about pointers and pointer syntax. (even
| though they still sort of existed).
|
| They sure seemed to me to be related. This is obviously most
| true for light use of the languages (JavaScript especially was
| designed for very light use)
| bobince wrote:
| > Did Java applets actually have a JS API?
|
| Sure. LiveConnect was commonly used as glue to invoke and
| interact with applets from JS.
|
| I wouldn't necessarily say that it enabled a virtually
| unlimited blah blah enterprise parp, but it had its uses. A
| common hack was to put some shared storage in an applet so
| multiple documents could use it to persist and communicate
| cross-document data, back before browsers could do that
| natively.
|
| There was some really tedious bug in IE with the Sun VM that
| occasionally allowed JS events to fire concurrently whilst
| LiveConnect was waiting for a response from a method called on
| an applet, which we never quite figured out. This was one of
| many things that made JS+applet development unreliable and
| unpleasant.
| Yaggo wrote:
| Not only the name, but also the C-like syntax was borrowed from
| Java because of marketing reasons, despite the semantics were
| inspired by quite different languages such as Scheme and Self.
| What a pity!
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Did Java applets actually have a JS API?
|
| It was possible to expose _something_ :
|
| https://www.codejava.net/java-se/applet/liveconnect-the-api-...
| ahlschwede wrote:
| Before Ajax one way to do Web 2.0 style interactions was to
| hide a Java applet in an invisible iFrame and feed data back
| and forth from the page using JavaScript.
|
| I think people forget that the early web had a proliferation of
| plug-ins. JavaScript was most often used as glue between HTML
| and plug-ins which had fewer platform incompatibilities than
| the browsers. One of the reasons Flash became the dominant
| plug-in was because it was universal enough to duplicate the
| features of other plug-ins, including asynchronous
| communication via Java applet.
| moron4hire wrote:
| IFrames were invented later (and initially, only in IE). You
| also didn't ever need to put the applet in a separate frame.
| You could just put the applet on the page. Indeed, putting it
| in a frame would have defeated the purpose, because there was
| no way to communicate across frames at the time.
| bawolff wrote:
| Yes, there was an api. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Archive/Web/LiveCon...
|
| That said, the nomenclature was pure marketng bs.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Some of the JS api (method names) matched the uniquely Java
| api.
| tbranyen wrote:
| Definitely, HTML has several tags to help work with external
| types. You can interface with java, vbscript, flash, pdf, etc.
| You could absolutely expose top level methods and invoke them
| in JS.
| coliveira wrote:
| It was just a marketing ploy based on the cooperation between
| Netscape and Sun. Sun would provide interoperability between JS
| and Java in the browser. Netscape would get the public support
| of a major corporation at a strategic time in its fight against
| MS.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Partly marketing but the integration certainly existed. As I
| recall, public methods in the main applet class are exposed to
| JavaScript. It was a little slow and clunky but it worked.
|
| The idea was similar to how web components are used today. Your
| web page would contain custom applets for a fancy input field,
| a calendar control date picker, and whatever other controls
| html didn't provide, all implemented as Applets.
|
| It could have worked out and the web today would have looked
| very different except that Java applets always performed
| terribly on first load. Nobody wanted to have their customers
| wait 30 seconds for the custom controls to initialize.
|
| I sometimes wonder what might have been if Sun had actually
| fixed the initialization of Applets. In many ways Applets were
| nicer to develop than today's web components.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Technically, why are / were Java applets so slow? I never dug
| into the ecosystem deeply enough to understand (plus a bit
| before my time).
|
| Was it JVM startup time, Java xfactory-begat-y-begat-z code
| init time, what?
|
| Also, applets run outside the browser, correct? I.e. on the
| browser's host system in a separate JVM process?
| hajile wrote:
| Java apps didn't integrate with regular HTML. They were
| more like Flash apps with all those downsides.
|
| Even today JS is interpreted before compiling to bytecode
| because the startup latency is much lower (JIT only kicks
| in once the background parsing is complete). Back in those
| days, the extent of JS was a few click handlers or similar.
| The JS interpreter would be done long before the JVM was
| even loaded into memory.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Oh, but they did. The DOM API was there from about 1.3
| (iirc).
| bitwize wrote:
| The browser had an embedded JVM and applets ran right on
| the page. It was very similar to WebAssembly today, just a
| fair bit chuggier.
|
| Two things caused people to backpedal from the applet
| strategy:
|
| 1) Because there was a large hiring pool of millions of
| fresh grads leaving college with a little Java under their
| belts, it having displaced C++ and Pascal as an
| introductory language, companies began Java projects and
| Java came to be seen as an enterprise language.
|
| 2) The JVM that Microsoft implemented inside IE had
| proprietary Microsoft extensions for greater Windows
| integration. Sun sued Microsoft over this, and won. After
| this, Sun pivoted to having Java be a browser plug-in in
| order to provide a consistent cross-browser experience,
| rather than having each browser vendor provide their own
| implementation. The browser plug-in was way clunkier even
| than the original embedded JVM was.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The death of Microsoft's JVM is when I lost most of my
| interest in Java. I understand why Sun didn't want
| Microsoft's JVM to exist. They could see Embrace, Extend,
| Extinguish coming for them but wow, did Microsoft's
| version ever work better. I did go on to create a good
| bit of Java code professionally but never touched it for
| hobby work.
|
| It really hurt Java in the browser when Microsoft refused
| to ship Sun's code with Windows. Not sure why Sun assumed
| that after suing Microsoft about the JVM, they'd be
| willing to distribute Sun's bits for them. They really
| seemed surprised and angry when this happened and were
| unprepared for it. Maybe pivoting to browser plug-ins was
| the only way forward they could see. Seems like the
| actual path forward would have been to make the Sun JVM
| better.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It was a weird time.
|
| Now, there's a straightforward business case and examples
| of the many strategic and financial benefits of owning
| development and guidance of an open platform.
|
| Then... you either owned a platform completely (closed)
| or didn't (someone else owned it). Vis: all the bs
| machinations around proprietary Unix distributions.
|
| Sun + Microsoft was likely seen more in the context of
| "ceding ownership to Microsoft" than "growing the
| platform, that we still have majority ownership of."
|
| Ultimately, hardware vs platforms thinking. Or my-share-
| of-zero-sum vs growing-the-market. Unfortunate.
| kalleboo wrote:
| My memory of the time (as a Mac user) was that the JVM
| startup time was the big killer. It took like 30-60
| seconds, during which it completely froze the
| (cooperatively-multitasked) OS. Of course it ate up a big
| chunk of memory at a time when our Mac had 16-24 MB of RAM
| total. And Netscape 3 was unstable enough that in a decent
| browsing session you'd have to relaunch it 2-3 times (each
| time unloading the JVM). Lowering the available memory of
| course worsened the stability.
|
| The applets themselves performed alright. They took a few
| seconds to initialize but we were used to waiting for JPEGs
| and hover effects to load over a 14.4 modem so that wasn't
| too bad relatively.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Sun seemed to have a real mental block when it came to
| applets - people screamed at them for years about
| performance and they refused to do anything about it.
| Indeed, in 1995 the simpliest applet would take several
| seconds to appear. In 2005 (about the time everyone stopped
| caring), the same applet would take ... several seconds to
| appear. They never got faster even as CPUs improved by
| several hundred percent.
|
| The Applets ran fast enough (even on 1995 machines) once
| loaded, at least fast enough to be useful. But that delay
| at startup when your CPU went to 100% and your hard drive
| buzzed away, freezing everything else you machine was
| doing, just killed any interest the public had in using
| applets.
|
| Part of the problem is that they JIT'ed everything without
| caching it and that included the standard Java libraries.
| So every applet started to execute, called some standard
| API, the API was JIT'ed, that called some other part of the
| API which was JIT'ed, etc, etc. I could never understand
| why they didn't compile at least the standard libraries on
| install or first use and save the result.
| lolive wrote:
| I think they still have the problem today. Which makes
| any JVM language to be slow to run in elastic
| environments (where hardware instances and server runs
| quickly come and go depending on the load).
| ethbr0 wrote:
| From everything I've touched Sun was always very... Unix
| in regards to UX.
|
| As in "Well, just learn to deal with it. And be grateful
| you have a graphical interface at all."
|
| Making things better, or pushing the state of graphical
| presentation art never seemed to even be a core interest,
| much less competency.
|
| Which is ironic, because a lot of that organizational
| choice seems reflected in Java, e.g. having to boil the
| ocean and re-implement everything for major arch changes.
| smm11 wrote:
| Sun briefly toyed with OpenStep, or essentially the UI of
| the NeXT machines that morphed into today Apple's OS X
| interface.
|
| Anything would have been better than CDE or OpenWindows
| at the time, and the NeXT GUI was quite innovative in the
| 90s.
| lenkite wrote:
| This was deliberate - they were afraid Java would become
| too popular on the browser side and people would stop
| buying their heavyweight servers. They always pushed Java
| as the server side language. If they wanted Java at the
| client side - they wanted pure Java clients (webstart,
| etc) not browsers hosting Java applets. Browsers hosting
| Java applets were sneered upon.
|
| JS eventually won the game here after IE advanced Web 1.0
| with great support for AJAX, etc.
|
| The funny thing is that if Sun was on the ball and didn't
| abandon HotJava, your modern day browser would have been
| a Java app.
| pram wrote:
| Yeah I dunno about that. HotJava was aggressively awful
| to use.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I agree. One of the many, many, many areas where Sun
| dropped the ball was the failure to implement a good HTML
| control in Java. HotJava was very basic.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I always thought JIT should be spelled JATWPT, for Just
| At The Worst Possible Time (when the user's waiting for
| the app to start up).
| dtech wrote:
| A combination of needing a heavyweight VM separately from
| the browser and being either interpreted or having to wait
| for a slow JIT.
|
| Remember Javascript was slow as ass too until the late
| 2000's when browsers were implementing efficient JS
| engines. If web pages would've been build like common JPAs
| they would've been as bad as applets.
| other_herbert wrote:
| They didn't have to be slow and you can communicate between
| the two with a parameter in the applet tag " mayscript"
| with that methods in the applet could be called from
| JavaScript. I used that for an invisible applet that would
| handle communication and drawing HTML to the browser..
| kind. Spa like way back in the Wild West days when applets
| could nearly do anything.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the integration certainly existed.
|
| Definitely. Even the fourth edition of Javascript: The
| Definitive Guide (published in 2002) still had an entire
| chapter on Java/Javascript compatibility.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It's because you could integrate a Java applet with JavaScript
| in the page and have it all interoperate.
|
| Pretty cool, too bad Java was so heavy...
| pqb wrote:
| > I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on
| JavaScript.
|
| It is still funny to see a job offer with a mistaken Java and
| JavaScript posted in a title or in requirements section.
| jfb wrote:
| A date that will live in infamy.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| 8 months later, Microsoft would release VBScript.
| greenkey wrote:
| Which became dominant for a while, but cgi scripts on the
| server-side were also hot.
|
| Enter Perl and PhP server-side.
|
| Then there was JSP, ASP, and ColdFusion, all server-side.
|
| Rails! Also server-side.
|
| Then back to JS.
| toyg wrote:
| Rails is like 10 years later tho... everything else you
| mentioned was already around by 2000.
| greenkey wrote:
| Rails 1 was released in 2004.
| shmerl wrote:
| They should have used the name LiveScript. Java in the name was a
| complete disaster.
| brightball wrote:
| It's funny seeing this. Yesterday I had to demo my 20 year old
| built in desk and found a Netscape Navigator CD inside.
| aproductguy wrote:
| I legit miss Sun. Worked there for two years in 2002/03, and the
| level of talent there was astounding.
| joe_momma wrote:
| Google where is your doodle honoring 25 years of javascript
| greenkey wrote:
| I wish Matz had been there with Rubyscript. JS wasn't as powerful
| back then; it took over a decade for it to evolve enough where
| people would really use it for much other than client-side
| validation and neat UI tricks. In comparison, Ruby was a great
| language to use, and it would've grown more quickly.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I wish they'd just used scheme
| colordrops wrote:
| Exactly - rubyscript would have been just as hated as
| javascript; something like scheme or some other well designed
| language would have been better.
| greenkey wrote:
| That's kind of harsh. Ruby was a great language and
| especially great syntax. Except for some duplication of
| methods and early misspelling of one or two methods, it
| would've been much easier for people to learn and do cool
| things with that didn't happen in JS until years later.
|
| Scheme's not bad, but I think if you compare The uptake of
| both, Ruby did better? (Not counting Lisp.) It was a cool
| language though; a lot of problems that would've been
| avoided, if people could type all the braces in
| correctly... for Lisp at least.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I think we would just have got more Java applets. The idea
| of a programming language accessible to everyone did
| contribute a lot to its success.
| [deleted]
| toyg wrote:
| Ruby was first released on the same year. Python had been
| around for 4 years already. What could have been, eh...
| ptx wrote:
| There was (in 1995) a Python-based web browser called
| Grail[1] that could run client-side Python applets[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grail_(web_browser)
|
| [2] http://grail.sourceforge.net/info/papers/restofus.html#ap
| ple...
| tacotacotacos wrote:
| Complements Java?!?
|
| I guess it also complements Erlang.
| bangtoyib wrote:
| nice
| lioeters wrote:
| Related - A project posted earlier today:
|
| Mocha1995 - The world's first JavaScript engine written in 1995
| by Brendan Eich, now compiled back to JS and WASM
|
| https://github.com/doodlewind/mocha1995/blob/main/blog/about...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300698
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Reminds me of one of Microsoft's first Dynamic HTML demos:
|
| There were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other
| labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site".
|
| When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site"
| button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before
| you could click it!
|
| Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site"
| button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse!
|
| Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)
| thrower123 wrote:
| What a disastrous day for the world.
| brundolf wrote:
| What stands out to me is how much more foresight they had than
| I'd thought about the ways JS would be used:
|
| > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form
| that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations
| right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia
| weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by
| JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the
| current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript
| script might pull data out of a relational database and format it
| in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that
| run on both the client and the server.
|
| We tend to think of JS as having started out as just a way to
| dynamically show/hide elements, maybe add an animation or two, on
| top of fundamentally HTML-based web pages. But I see here
| described what we now think of as "web apps", and even web
| _servers_ (!) written in JS. They even talk about code-sharing on
| the front and back ends, a la React in hybrid-mode. I had no idea
| those things were in people 's minds at its inception.
|
| Edit: Apparently they already ran JS on the server! I had no idea
|
| > Netscape LiveWire enables JavaScript programs to be installed,
| run and managed on Netscape servers
| deft wrote:
| ASP, the original one before .net, had a language called
| jscript that ran the ie js engine on the server.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Didn't visual basic support some kind of client side code?
| aidos wrote:
| IE (3? 4?) let you specify vbscript instead of JavaScript as
| the language in your script tags.
|
| Edit: introduced in IE3 (1996) apparently.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_3
| drblast wrote:
| The industry is cyclical and to be forward thinking all you
| have to do is describe what's already happened and assume it
| will happen again. ;-)
|
| The things being done with JavaScript today are not new, nor is
| the idea that a server and client would coordinate to run
| interactive apps. That fundamental concept has been
| reimplemented in many different ways until we've landed on the
| current rube goldbergian monstrosity that are web apps.
|
| It shows that the desire to have users interact with a service
| in particular ways will not go away. The technology used to do
| that is mostly irrelevant.
| brundolf wrote:
| I'm not surprised that the architecture isn't new, I'm
| surprised that web apps were already being talked about this
| way using JS specifically. JS's early design flaws are often
| written off as, "well it was never intended to be a _real_
| programming language like it is today ". But from reading
| this, that doesn't sound to be the case.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| I think JS' early design flaws were a result of being
| written in a day more than anything to do with a specific
| purpose (I exaggerate but not by much). Though it is true
| that most people at the time used JS (if they used it) for
| much simpler tasks than described in the article.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I don't so much think of them as flaws... the first use
| case was form validation, and most of the fuzzy type
| coercion makes a ton of sense through that lens, where ''.
| 0, etc. coercion to falsy is easy for dealing with user
| input. It's also why it's one of my favorite options for
| ETL workloads.
|
| It's just a matter of understanding the langauge. That
| said, it's been my favorite language since well before the
| "good parts" book.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I agree with your basic premise. However, in this particular
| instance, what would have been the historical equivalent
| ("already happened") of scripts sent by the server to the
| client during the request response cycle, which could perform
| layout and logic in the client?
|
| If you're simply referring to code that could run on both
| client and server, your point is clearer to me.
| [deleted]
| cubano wrote:
| AJAX is part of the request response cycle?
|
| Let's face facts...AJAX is the real secret sauce with JS
| and what makes it truly useful.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > already happened and assume it will happen again
|
| So say we all!
| osullip wrote:
| Under appreciated BSG reference. Well done!
| cubano wrote:
| Yes for sure..I worked as a corporate contractor for AT&T in
| 1990's and I was doing client/server apps using MSVC++ that
| are basically identical to React-type wideweb dev...
|
| Indeed, your absolutely correct in saying it was obvious
| where webapps had to go, and that HTML and CSS just wasn't
| going to get us there.
| amenod wrote:
| Nitpick: "...and that HTML just wasn't going to get us
| there" (CSS came out in 1996).
| AntiRush wrote:
| Philip Greenspun has a great review of Netscape LiveWire from
| the time.
|
| https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/livewire.html
|
| You can see that the current JavaScript tooling complains are
| nothing new under the sun: So what used to be a
| few keystrokes in Emacs or Netscape Gold now
| requires three steps: edit the .html file
| recompile the .web file restart the LiveWire app from
| the appmgr
| Lammy wrote:
| This quote is adorable considering the size of most pages
| today:
|
| "This approach has several disadvantages, the first of which
| is speed. You are gratuitously transporting potentially many
| kilobytes of data back and forth across the network."
| pmontra wrote:
| I was there, kB were an issue. We had 56 kb/s modems vs
| (let's say) 56 Mb/s fiber now. We gained a x1000 factor and
| we're dealing with many MB now instead of many kB back
| then. Page size grew x1000 too.
|
| But loading pages was really slow, mainly because browsers
| were slow. No parallel loading of images, no progressive
| rendering. Those were the first optimizations.
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| Running the same logic and the same technology in the server
| and the client was mandatory for realtime multiplayer games
| since the 1990s. See this article from Valve [1] for a briew
| overview of how client side prediction works. You should also
| have the server process the data to avoid cheating by
| modificating the client app.
|
| [1]
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...
| cubano wrote:
| Wait a minute here...I was writing realtime multiplayer games
| for Galacticomm's MajorBBS in thr late 80's and we just
| pushed ANSI and made VERY interactive games without the need
| for a rich client...altho we did envy AOL's bitmapped graphic
| capabilities at times...
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I 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.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Correction: Submitting bug reports to Netscape.
| Rochus wrote:
| Wow, 25 years. Feels like yesterday, but several technological
| revolutions happened in these years.
| forinti wrote:
| Such a shame that they didn't pick Scheme.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Anyone know what ever came of this?
| divan wrote:
| Such 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.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Java applets? Flash?
| divan wrote:
| I'm thinking mostly on a scenario where browsers could have a
| competition of existing languages (C, C++, Java, Lua, etc).
| ibraheemdev wrote:
| Hopefully a few years/decades from now, we will be remembering
| the day WebAssembly was announced. [1]
|
| 1: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/150
| sturza wrote:
| We have to go back Marty!
| toyg wrote:
| "Hey you, take your damn javascript off her..."
| siggi_pop wrote:
| That's funny cause I announced a poo in pot that day.
| newyorker2 wrote:
| > JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used
| by people with little or no programming experience to quickly
| construct complex applications.
|
| >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 enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually
| unlimited.
|
| JS has come a long way in 25 years :-)
| [deleted]
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| > JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and
| servers,
|
| Funny how long it took node.js to appear and make this bit of
| press release a common reality.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| >> _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)
| lostcolony wrote:
| I think that's something JS also shares with Java, no. A huge
| number of the people focusing in it are terrible devs.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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.
| snazz wrote:
| It's popular and taught in schools, so I don't think this
| is really surprising.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yes, but my point was, if you know about pointers, you
| are likely a better js dev than average as you have some
| background knowledge about the computer. And know what
| memory is and why it is not unlimited. And why some
| operations are expensive and others not.
|
| Also, it did help me recently, working with wasm. Not
| compiling it yet, but using a libary.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| For that I have seen too much code from C hackers, who
| consider _each_ abstraction bad and try to outsmart the
| compiler, while seeing great architectures in JavaScript
| from people who have no idea what a pointer might be.
|
| Being capable of two different languages (TS and JS
| doesn't count ;)) however is a useful indicator.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "while seeing great architectures in JavaScript from
| people who have no idea what a pointer might be."
|
| Those people have to be naturals, though. Or really just
| focused on javascript and only javascript if they know
| about software architecture but nothing about compilers
| or pointers.
|
| But sure, you definitely can write bad JS, if you are
| forced to use JS, when you wanted to use C (++) ... which
| probably happened to a lot of people, which is why we see
| the hate of JS in that intensity.
| duxup wrote:
| 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 ;)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Curious about the relative areas of esoterica...
|
| Are there bad COBOL developers still practicing? FORTRAN?
|
| What about Ada? Erlang? Smalltalk?
|
| The mainframe families?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Certainly. Depending on your definition of terrible.
| There are people who can keep the things running, but
| only do patch on patch to keep things together, but no
| architectural work, making more and more mess and we'll
| knowing they are unreplacable. (Partially encouraged by
| bad management direction)
| Aperocky wrote:
| There could be bad developer in COBOL but you would never
| hear about them.
| coldtea wrote:
| No algebraic types. Less speed than Smalltalk. Lame.
| bisRepetita wrote:
| >Oracle Corporation Mark Benioff: (415) 506-7000
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I remember this, when the HTML chats didn't need to be manually
| refreshed anymore...
|
| I still test with Netscape 2.0 out of respect, and some JS
| features work with it on my site.
|
| The Web is just amazing, I can write across 25 years of platforms
| from a dozen different vendors, totally unrelated, and it works
| in all of them!
| mseepgood wrote:
| > 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.
| rbg246 wrote:
| Think it was this (I am sure someone here will know better):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine)
|
| Albeit it was two years after the announcement.
| philo23 wrote:
| Yeah, I remember people talking about Rhino when node.js
| originally came out, saying things like it's been tried
| before and wouldn't catch on.
| k__ wrote:
| There were a few backend products that used server-side JS
| before Node.js
|
| The Netscape Server had JS in 1998.
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-6411-10/contents.ht...
| [deleted]
| based2 wrote:
| http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/55431/Broad...
| timw4mail wrote:
| Classic ASP had JScript, I once had the dubious pleasure of
| using JScript instead of VB on an ASP website.
| TomGullen wrote:
| 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!
| sradman wrote:
| Netscape had LiveWire, Microsoft had ASP, and Sybase had
| PowerDynamo. The first version of ASP was interpreted and
| supported pluggable scripting engines including JScript and
| VBScript. The Netscape and Sybase DynaScript interpreters ran
| on various flavors of Unix and RISC chips and were used much
| like PHP, Rails, and Django; web interface to relational
| databases.
| vesinisa wrote:
| It wasn't. They basically predicted Node.js 15 years before its
| inception.
|
| EDIT: Okay, server-side JS indeed long predates Node.js. See
| below.
| BigFatGuy wrote:
| Netscape Enterprise Server executed server-side JavaScript
| ("SSJS")
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-5653-10/816-5653-10.
| ..
| peteri wrote:
| It was also an option for IIS as well as vbscript in classic
| ASP pages.
| icedchai wrote:
| It was. I developed sites using Netscape Livewire, the server
| side JS in Netscape Enterprise Server. It was probably closer
| to ASP and PHP scripting, mixing HTML, client-side JS, and
| server-side JS in the same file.
| tootie wrote:
| This was later but there was an entire server-side JS stack
| called Helma back in 2008:
| https://blog.astithas.com/2008/04/javascript-on-server-with-...
| BasDirks wrote:
| This is an important document, because it disproves the prevalent
| notion that Java and JavaScript have nothing to do with each
| other.
|
| JavaScript has come a long way, to where the shame of any self-
| respecting engineer has been reduced to a bearable minimum!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| No, it actually proves the notion that Java and JavaScript
| having something to do with each other was just marketing
| bullshit.
| pluc wrote:
| I wouldn't say bare minimum, JS still is all stupid about
| types.
| annadane wrote:
| This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded
| as a bad move
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > complementary to and integrated with Java
|
| That didn't go so well. It's well integrated with Webkit at least
| ;)
| [deleted]
| cicero wrote:
| I remember being very excited about this announcement. I had been
| learning about Java, but I only had an HP workstation, which ran
| HP-UX Unix at work, and a Macintosh at home. Neither of them had
| a Java implementation yet, but I could run Netscape Navigator
| with JavaScript. I gave an enthusiastic talk on JavaScript at the
| next meeting of our local Java Users Group.
|
| However, as I got to know the language better, my enthusiasm
| dwindled due to what I thought to be a strange type system. Also,
| I got access to Java implementations on HP-UX and Macintosh, so I
| never went back to JS. This has always limited my ability to do
| web front-ends, but now I'm looking to using Blazor for that.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I'm glad they added all the individual contact information at the
| bottom -- I'm going call up Mark Benioff at Oracle (415) 506-7000
| to ask him how to download the source!
| mattl wrote:
| That's just the main Oracle number I'm sure
| supernova87a wrote:
| I'm not sure, but I think he's no longer at Oracle.
| mattl wrote:
| Probably not
| kkotak wrote:
| Yep, before the Paypal mafia, there was the Oracle mafia :)
| xtracto wrote:
| I think technology-wise, the Sun mafia were the cool kids. Or
| the Silicon Graphic mafia and even Microsoft.
|
| I was born in 1981, and the "cool" technology places to be
| when I was growing up were Microsoft, Sun and
| SiliconGraphics.
| desmap wrote:
| OT: I recently learned C++ after doing JS/TS for years. This was
| an eye-opener because there were so many similarities which JS
| inherited from C/C++. Plus stuff I've seen in other languages and
| environments.
|
| After this, I thought that everybody should learn C/C++ at
| school, it's like Latin to other languages (I learned Turbo
| Pascal at school and didn't like how it handled pointers and its
| overall elaborative style).
| vips7L wrote:
| C/C++ isn't a language! They're completely separate.
| desmap wrote:
| I know this very well, still both have similarities to JS and
| eventually, C++ evolved from C. No need to be snarky.
| xtanx wrote:
| FYI the internet archive is currently having a 2-to-1 matching
| campaign.
|
| https://archive.org/donate/
| doublerabbit wrote:
| It's a shame too that TCL wasn't chosen to be the script of
| choice.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| There was a whole war about that, in which Sun originally
| supported TCL (having hired John Ousterhout), that was started
| by RMS firing the first shot ("Why you should not use TCL"),
| but which TCL eventually lost.
|
| The Tcl War (1994) (vanderburg.org)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218
|
| https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
|
| Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman
| (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400
|
| https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html
|
| John Ousterhout's classy reply:
|
| https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html
|
| Personally, I was on the side of ScriptX at the time
| (essentially object oriented scheme with a more traditional
| syntax and a nice multimedia class library including
| QuickTime), but it wasn't mature or open enough at the time,
| and we lost too:
|
| ScriptX and the World Wide Web. "Link Globally, Interact
| Locally". By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs.
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX
|
| The real tragedy is that the script of choice for the web was't
| Lua:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092
|
| by DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 [-]
|
| Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully
| and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic
| University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
|
| "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been
| explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However,
| Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data
| description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not
| consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax.
| Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself
| atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural
| that we should try to develop our own scripting language ...
| Because many potential users of the language were not
| professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic
| syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language
| should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very
| diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we
| expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a
| scripting language, the new language should follow the example
| of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API."
|
| http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Awesome read. Thank you.
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