3 ms·

> “...JS developed so fast and so wildly that there was never a breather to form and write down best practices or opinions.” js and ruby were released in 1995,

> “...JS developed so fast and so wildly that there was never a breather to form and write down best practices or opinions.” js and ruby were released in 1995, with rails coming 10 years later. so js development wasn’t fast in the least. after the little ajax blip resulting from outlook web access’s release in 98, js stagnated until node came along and made it interesting again. prototype/jquery a little before it and later front-end frameworks like backbone, ember and then angular helped cement js as a thing. it only seems fast and wild because the ecosystem really only woke up again in the 2010s. (i tooled around with js on netscape right after it came out but then lost interest)

rimliu 8y ago
JS may be released in 1995 but it was not used much for anything except changing status bar messages, or image rollovers (remember those?) for at least ten years. Sure there also was Microsofts DHTML on IE, which failed to get much traction. Only starting with GMail and AJAX in 2004-2005 JS started to be treated seriously, it still took some years and SPA hype to become "a must". So about ten years max. Also Rails was constantly evolving since inception, alas, a lot of JS is revolving, i.e. solving the same problems over and over again, just with different approaches. The last point would be that people initially taking up Rails were not new to programming and usually switched from PHP or Java. Now Javascript is often the first (alas, often the only) language people learn. So I'd say the culture is quite different.
- clairity 8y ago
  yes, agreed, ruby is a much friendlier language to start with, but javascript is more accessible since everyone has a browser or three. while gmail brought a nicer ui/ux, i still credit ms owa for showing the world what js could be when it grew up.
tomaskafka 8y ago
Well of course js development is slow - you can upgrade Rails v1 to differently opinionated Rails v2 on a server overnight. Try upgrading 8 billion people to a browser that supports eg. ES6.
- clairity 8y ago
  sure, but that wasn’t a problem 10 and 20 years ago when js development was even slower. the language just hasn’t evolved as much as others.

rimliu 8y ago

JS may be released in 1995 but it was not used much for anything except changing status bar messages, or image rollovers (remember those?) for at least ten years. Sure there also was Microsofts DHTML on IE, which failed to get much traction. Only starting with GMail and AJAX in 2004-2005 JS started to be treated seriously, it still took some years and SPA hype to become "a must". So about ten years max. Also Rails was constantly evolving since inception, alas, a lot of JS is revolving, i.e. solving the same problems over and over again, just with different approaches. The last point would be that people initially taking up Rails were not new to programming and usually switched from PHP or Java. Now Javascript is often the first (alas, often the only) language people learn. So I'd say the culture is quite different.

clairity 8y ago
yes, agreed, ruby is a much friendlier language to start with, but javascript is more accessible since everyone has a browser or three. while gmail brought a nicer ui/ux, i still credit ms owa for showing the world what js could be when it grew up.

tomaskafka 8y ago

Well of course js development is slow - you can upgrade Rails v1 to differently opinionated Rails v2 on a server overnight. Try upgrading 8 billion people to a browser that supports eg. ES6.

clairity 8y ago
sure, but that wasn’t a problem 10 and 20 years ago when js development was even slower. the language just hasn’t evolved as much as others.