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Javascript language was originally written in ~10 days by Brendan Eich[0]. The limited time meant that it was a bare bones primitive language that did not incl
by jasode 7y ago
Javascript language was originally written in ~10 days by Brendan Eich[0]. The limited time meant that it was a bare bones primitive language that did not include an opinionated and standard GUI library.
Compare that to how Java and C# gestated internally for years at Sun and Microsoft before the v1.0 of the respective languages were released. With more development time, they included a bigger standard library. Java has AWT (and then Swing), and C# had WinForms (and then WPF).
Yes, one could argue that Java and C# also have "UI frameworks" on top of their base GUI technology but it's nowhere near the same chaotic degree as Javascript's landscape.
Javascript is so barebones that people made frameworks for:
- manipulating DOM elements (e.g. JQuery, etc)
- simulating classes & objects
- calculating dates (e.g. Momentjs)
- UI and state flow (Vue, React, Angular, etc)
In Java/C#, you can subtract 2 dates in using their standard library of datetime functions. Javascript can't do that easily[1] and programmers end up rummaging through github repos and/or npm for libraries that multiple people reinvent. Another famous example of Javascript's small standard library is not having a builtin leftpad().
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+Brendan+Eich+10+days https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+Brendan+Eich+10+d...
[1] picture those variations in Stackoverflow answers leading to different not-invented-here Javascript datetime libraries:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3224834/get-difference-between-2-dates-in-javascript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3224834/get-difference-b...
- arethuza 7y agoIn the early days Java also had 3rd party UI libraries/tools from people like Marimba.
- barberousse 7y agoJavascript was never designed with the intent of ever being anything like Java is terms of reach and magnitude though, that's a hindsight thing.
- jasode 7y ago>Javascript was never designed with the intent of ever being anything like Java I agree.[0] I'm not criticizing Javascript nor Brendan Eich but trying to state why Javascript's particular history of minimal built-in capabilities has a ripple effect of motivating lots of bespoke frameworks. In a similar vein, the early C++ language didn't have a very extensive string manipulation library. So what happens? Different C++ programmers wrote their own little custom string libraries. E.g. Qt QString functions are different from Microsofts MFC CString. Take that example of code diversity and multiply it by 1000x for Javascript. [0] "The by-design purpose of JavaScript was to make the monkey dance when you moused over it." -- from https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/221658 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/221658
- barberousse 7y agoUnderstood