https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1018 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something... duskw

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1018 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something... duskwuff: So, since I have to ask: What would we be stuck with if JS hadn't happened? Brendan Eich: Something like PHP only worse, which Netscape's VP Eng killed fast (in early July 1995, if memory serves; I did JS in early-mid-May) since it was "third" after Java and JS. Two new web programming languages were hard enough to justify... also: Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date -- Y2K bugs and all! Gosling...). Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_calls http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self). and: Scheme was the ideal admired by the JS supporters at Netscape, and the trick used to recruit me. But (see above) the "look like Java" orders and the intense time pressure combined to take out a lot of good ideas from Scheme that would've taken longer (not much longer, sigh) to implement. One example: just the C-like syntax makes tail calls harder (or less likely: consider falling off the end of a function returns undefined, so the last expression-statement before such an implicit return is not in tail position).