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JavaScript is a great example. It was hastily thrown together, not well thought-through, and didn't wind up being a substantial competitive advantage for its c
by rabidrat 10y ago
JavaScript is a great example. It was hastily thrown together, not well thought-through, and didn't wind up being a substantial competitive advantage for its corporate owner Netscape, which is now defunct.
But we are still suffering from the aftermath. I wonder how much better the web coding world would be if Brendan Eich had been able to spend 60 days on it instead of the 10 was given?
- cookiecaper 10y agoYeah, I absolutely agree that we've felt the sting of JavaScript for far too long, but the fact that it's so hard to replace only further demonstrates the point. People are optimized to expend the smallest amount of energy necessary to reach a certain point. Unless a new client-side scripting language comes out and enables something that practically everyone, even non-programmers, wants and wasn't reasonably doable before, JavaScript is here to stay. Meanwhile, committee-designed projects like Dart have floundered and ultimately failed in their ambitions to bring a better client-side scripting language to the web, despite the backing of the largest internet company on the planet.
- bryanrasmussen 10y agoJavaScript is a great example because if it wasn't completed there wasn't anything in particular that we know of that could have been sure to win. I wonder how much worse it could have been. The only thing really competing with JavaScript in its early years was VbScript. If Netscape didn't make a solution, Microsoft probably would have. And that would most likely have been something like VbScript. Not infinitely worse, but quite a bit worse.