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If only Brendan Eich had ended up "doing Scheme" in Netscape as he was originally recruited to! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786720 https://news.ycomb
by panic 9y ago
If only Brendan Eich had ended up "doing Scheme" in Netscape as he was originally recruited to! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786720)
- coldtea 9y agoJavascript survived (and eventually caught on) not just because it was the "only game in town" for the web, but also because it was familiar. If Eich indeed had produced a scheme, then it would have been superseded and replaced by another algol-derived language by browser makers soon -- and users would have flocked to that.
- panic 9y agoIf familiarity mattered that much, why wasn't HTML itself replaced by something with curly braces, or CSS by something procedural?
- coldtea 9y agoBecause HTML wasn't a programming language. Template languages were like that (e.g. SGML) and worse. Besides, unlike JavaScript it wasn't the product of a single vendor, but a standard, and the basis upon which the web stood from the beginning.