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I agree that claims for Blub (for any value of "Blub") are too often over-hyped. But don't make stuff up in the course of justifying your reasonable point again
by BrendanEich 10y ago
I agree that claims for Blub (for any value of "Blub") are too often over-hyped. But don't make stuff up in the course of justifying your reasonable point against hype.
I met John McCarthy in 1977. In college, a professor (Ruth Davis, I think; SCU EECS department) brought in someone who taught Friedman's "The Little LISPer". By the time I got to Netscape, I had read SICP. I knew enough about LISP to be dangerous.
But as I've said many times, and Netscape principals have confirmed, the reason JS isn't Scheme is because Netscape did the Java deal with Sun by the time I hired on (after I was recruited with "come and do Scheme in the browser"), and that meant the "sidekick language" had to "look like Java".
There was no "chose to write". Netscape management gave the MILLJ order; Netscape source was C (mostly), JS ("Mocha") was supposed to go server-side via "LiveWire" as well as embed in Navigator, and I was a C hacker. These are the reasons for the new language and its first implementation language.
- jodrellblank 10y agoBut don't make stuff up in the course of justifying your reasonable point against hype Where's the fun in that? ;) No, but really - I apologize for claiming there wasn't enough general LISP enthusiasm around when you were at college to affect you, and for not actually looking into the history of JS before making statements about how/why it happened. JS design being partly a pre-made business decision - that's something I really should have known by now.