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What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

140 points by philnash 7y ago

jbob2000 7y ago
Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.
- danaliv 7y ago
  Yeah, this is all marketing/partnership fluff. I'd be much more interested in seeing flame wars from Usenet. :) I was programming back then but I don't remember what the sentiment was at the time. I just remember Microsoft insisting on calling it "JScript" or "ActiveScript" or something because they didn't want to give Java any mindshare over ActiveX.
  - jasonhansel 7y ago
    Yep. IE went so far as to add support for VBScript (a language based on visual basic) to compete.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      I now wish there'd be actual Python on the web.
      - badsectoracula 7y ago
        I haven't tested it and it might not work in a recent IE, but at least at the past IE used ActiveScript so any ActiveScript language could be used. Python can be installed as an ActiveScript engine and used via IE. The same applies with other languages too (e.g. Perl, Ruby, etc).
- danmg 7y ago
  It was not well liked. The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation. Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.
  - jherdman 7y ago
    This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      With TypeScript and async/await papering over its greatest sins and inconveniences, it's not half bad.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Not only that, for years afterwards the techie crowd and equivalent of places like HN (I suppose I am mostly talking about slashdot) had a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, etc. I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like gmail in 2004 were a turning point.
    - LandR 7y ago
      >a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, I still feel like this.
      - asveikau 7y ago
        Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new normal.
- l33tman 7y ago
  As far as I can remember, people didn't really think much about it, after all without all the modern libraries the language was useless, and browsers were only marginally able to run Active-X and Java stuff anyway so people weren't even into the mindset that "this new language could be used to write web apps". To me as a regular user, JavaScript was only there to do annoying popups at the start. Funny how some things never change...
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Back then, most all the Javascript you ever saw was client-side form validation. Single-page-apps were still a long way off, so all web apps were built in form submission style: the user fills out some form data, it gets sent to the server, the server tells them they filled it out wrong and re-presents the form to the user. You could make that a little more user-friendly by having Javascript validate the form _before_ the users submitted it: but you had to validate it again on the server side because the user might have Javascript turned off, or might be a hacker. That meant that, for most web developers, Javascript just meant extra work: you had to duplicate your form-validation logic in a very finicky, untestable, untyped programming language. Browser makers were working on adding some flashier stuff like drop-down menus and image rollovers, but they didn’t work across different browsers (all both of them), so even the few people who did know how to use the extensions were encouraged not to. It seemed like everybody who could avoid Javascript did - I can’t really for the life of me understand how the early Javascript developers actually got anything done in it. It was a really painful way to develop software until maybe ten years ago.
- keithnz 7y ago
  it was something to do very simple things to enhance websites usability. I don't really remember anyone particularly liking it. It was something you tended to learn as little of in a very reluctant way. More exciting was things like Java applets or Flash. I did a bunch of stuff with Java applets and was quite impressed in 95-96 when java first came out. I wrote some simple 2d games (falling block puzzle games) which got semi popular. No way to do that in the js world at the time.
- blablabla123 7y ago
  I remember doing a tutorial from a computer magazine in the 90s. The article was presenting the basic features like for, while, if... So I thought wow, now I can program stuff in the web browser. The tutorial was then starting with hands-on code, like document.writeln("Hello world!"); Seems quite a natural thing to do when coming from other languages. But after playing around with it for an afternoon, I came to the conclusion: that's too difficult, I rather spend my time on something else. (If I remember correctly, at that time I was comfortable with Basic and had a little exposure to C++ and Pascal)
pier25 7y ago
The GIFs are the best part
- echelon 7y ago
  I'm actually very disappointed in the gifs. Most of the memes are faux retro. The fiji water bottle is representative of the vaporwave aesthetic from 2016 or so. The font animation is also super modern, circa early 2010s. It's all fake. They should have pulled more stuff from Geocities archive. This is not how things were.
aazaa 7y ago
The release of JavaScript was deeply confusing to me as a developer back then. Java applets and Macromedia Flash were already touted by their vendors as the one true way forward for interactivity. The scripting language released at about the same time seemed like an oddball. It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well. It was extremely slow, limiting the complexity of what could be built with it. There were problems galore with cross-browser compatibility of what was written. There was no reliable vector graphics or canvas system, so you really couldn't do much graphically. The DOM interface was hard to understand to be charitable. It didn't run outside of the browser, so how dare you call yourself a developer if you were using it? To the extent that developers knew JavaScript existed at all, it was not considered a programming language. These things started to change in the early 2000. So deeply ingrained with the disgust for JavaScript, that it took a very long time for the consensus to emerge that you could actually build very complex software on a post-V8 runtime.
- shados 7y ago
  I remember dealing with JS early on the same way I deal with bash today. With all the weird apis no one understood at the time, limited internet resources (and even books at first), it was just a crazy quest to hunt someone who knew what to do, copy it, and try to tweak it (usually unsuccessfully) until something kind of sortoff does what you want.
- reflectiv 7y ago
  Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was even possible. After Gmail...things really started to move in the javascript world...people started to put effort into both the runtimes and the libraries.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.
myhf 7y ago
No printf. Less keywords than Java. Lame.
- bloopernova 7y ago
  Being downvoted by people that don't know their Slashdot+iPod history: https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
- kazinator 7y ago
  Sibling comment identifies obscure Slashdot meme from 2001. Have an upvote.
- doctor_eval 7y ago
  CmdrTaco will never live this down.
  - cmdrtaco 7y ago
    You have no idea.
ConcernedCoder 7y ago
To be fair, I didn't start programming in JavaScript until 2000, but even back then I could see that it would be a game changer for the web.
qubex 7y ago
I vividly remember working on my school’s website in 1997 with Microsoft FrontPage. I had built a rather complicated system where it would be possible to arrive at the same page from several origins. Whereas most web-pages had hyperlinks or allowed the user to use the “Back” button on the browser. I decided I was going to have none of that amateur stuff or reliance on what is now referred to as “browser chrome” (though if the term even existed back then, I surely wasn’t aware of it). So I looked into this JavaScript thing, and wrote my first ever script embedded into a button: onclick=“javascript.history.go(-1)” I was so proud of myself. For about a year users of my school’s website were visibly amazed.
rdiddly 7y ago
Wow, apparently JavaScript was 100% great and there was nothing at all negative about it ever, according to people in tech!
- steego 7y ago
  That's because they hadn't used it yet. :) In all seriousness, everyone was in on Java. Even Microsoft (Everyone was in on Java, even Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B). So most of us saw browser plugins and applets as the future, and some of those plug-ins were very impressive in those days. JavaScript was seen as a glue language to manipulate components built in better languages. We thought there was going to be a rich component marketplace that was going to be embedded in web pages. We didn't think we'd still be mucking around with HTML and DOM manipulations.
  - tabtab 7y ago
    I also thought Java was the future. But, Java tried to be an entire virtual OS, and gained too many security holes because of that. Flash had a similar fate. It's not that JavaScript solved that, it's that it's built into the browser such that you can't really skip it. Like the Java and Flash engine, a web browser is also a fat bloated leaky client. However, if you toss the first two, you are then dealing with 1 fat client instead of 3 fat clients. It's easier to keep 1 FC up to date than 3.
    - steego 7y ago
      Do you think the security holes killed Java and Flash? Or do you think they were just nails in the coffin? I suspect performance and inconsistent experience killed Java applets and Sun stopped caring about desktop Java when they realized they can't make much money off it. Flash stuck around a lot longer than Java because it was fast, fun and ran consistently. It still lingered for some time after Jobs poisoned it. Honestly, I don't think people cared that much about running updates. For most people, if the computer tells them they need to update, they update. I also don't think average users cared about security issues back then.
russellbeattie 7y ago
I think that for consumer applications, JavaScript took a while to be really useful - like someone else noted Gmail was the first serious JS app I can think of. But for Intranets, it was pretty essential pretty quickly as web apps took over from Lotus Notes, Access databases, a million dBase applications and other proprietary front ends. And Microsoft was pushing it (and VBScript) hard in Internet Explorer under the DHTML moniker. In 1999 I worked on a contract for Levi's in SF and clearly remember using JavaScript to pull data from a huge hierarchy of product styles and presenting it to the end user as a widget where they could add/remove/move entries around. I remember abusing the cookies API to save the latest client state between page refreshes as it was the only real way to do that at the time. Something like this would have been a total pain in the ass without logic in the browser. In fact, I may have been replacing some sort of Java Applet or ActiveX widget which did something similar in a slower, less flexible way. So whether it was a huge success outside of corporations or not, I was using it to make a living pretty much from day one.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  First proper JavaScript apps were Firefox/Netscape 9/Thunderbird where the user interface was done in JavaScript+XUL, while not being loaded from a server and most logic was done in C++.
projektfu 7y ago
I couldn't make heads nor tails of it when it debuted. But I was only 17. This article brings me back to a time when every product had a bunch of these "empty suit" quotes about it. The person never said that stuff, it was all written for them. I remember being on a project where marketing fluff was "said" by someone who had no idea what was going on and, besides, the product wasn't doing anything, let alone what he claimed the technology enabled it to do.
btilly 7y ago
JavaScript is a fascinating example of Microsoft successfully getting a giant own goal. The promise of the web was cross platform applications that required no installation. Microsoft's fear was that cross platform applications would make the operating system irrelevant and reduce Windows lock-in. Both Sun (with Java) and Netscape wanted Microsoft's worst fears to happen. This was the era of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. So Microsoft embraced the web and added a variety of extensions that only worked on Internet Explorer and Windows. The browser wars followed, which Microsoft resoundingly won. Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft applications using various Microsoft extensions. One of those applications was Microsoft Outlook. Which needed to poll the server and find out if there was new mail. For that purpose they wrote the first version of the XmlHttpRequest object. This was in 1999 and they thought nothing more of it...until gmail and then Google Maps came out in 2004 and demonstrated what could be done with it. The next thing you know, everyone is talking AJAX. Mozilla makes the web accessible to the world. And then Google decided to throw serious energy into a better JavaScript runtime (aka V8) because they wanted to be able to write more sophisticated applications. And the result is that Microsoft's nightmare has now been realized. But none of it could have happened without that fateful decision to supply the missing piece for a ton of applications of having an asynchronous way to go back for more data without loading another web page.
- interestica 7y ago
  I've been listening to the podcast 'Cautionary Tales' about the unintended consequences of certain actions. This seems like it would fit well as a great story.
- majormajor 7y ago
  > Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft applications using various Microsoft extensions. IE ran on Mac but, in a super-fun fashion, wasn't exactly the same IE, IIRC. There was a period, pre-Camino (Mozilla fork before Firebird/Firefox for Mac got good), pre-Safari, where IE was the single best browser for Macs, yet still wasn't as good as IE on PC...
billziss 7y ago
I wrote my first website in 1995 and started using Javascript in 1996 (only I think it was called Livescript back then)? I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it. (Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!) My opinion of Javascript has not improved over the years. I worked with Javascript for a while and in complex enough problems that my name ended up on 2-3 patents and patent applications. I no longer work on the web, but I have occasional need for Javascript and I always hate my time with it. This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant.
- phillipkang 7y ago
  I think the accessibility of web browsers and npm allowed the JavaScript ecosystem to explode, hence it's staying power.
- jiofih 7y ago
  Why do you hate it? It’s one of the friendliest languages in current use, a nice mix of OO and FP, with top-notch tooling everywhere, and incredible performance for an interpreted language.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  > I think it was called Livescript back then)? As Encyclopedia Brittanica (!! who'd have thought) puts it, JavaScript was developed in 1995 at Netscape Communications Corp. and was conceived of as a companion to Java. It was originally called Mocha and then LiveScript before Netscape received a marketing license from Sun.[0] And then it became 'a dialect of ECMAScript'... [0] https://www.britannica.com/technology/JavaScript https://www.britannica.com/technology/JavaScript
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  > This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant. If you're going to do in browser development, what choice so you have? I can understand server-side JavaScript, mostly to avoid cognitive load from learning two languages. Otherwise, I think WebAssembly is a lot more promising of a technology.
tobyhinloopen 7y ago
I loved building JavaScript apps when JavaScript wasn’t cool yet. (2006-2010)
- unreal37 7y ago
  I built JavaScript apps in 1995-1996... Must have been extremely uncool then...
seemslegit 7y ago
Fast forward 25 years and we have three different semantics for "not a thing"
xenomachina 7y ago
When JavaScript first came out, it couldn't do much. Aside from toys (eg: scrolling text in the status bar) the "serious" uses were mostly: - (hopefully redundant) client-side validation - some styling (CSS was also brand new) - basic animation (eg: changing the on-hover appearance of stuff) - form "tweaking" (eg: disabling/hiding parts of a form dynamically based on other field values). It wasn't really for writing apps in, just for adding small enhancements to apps that did their real work server-side.
rathel 7y ago
I wonder what the alternative reality could be in which browsers adopted Tcl instead.
- cnasc 7y ago
  That might be an interesting counterfactual for a blog post (or series). What if {x} had been the dominant web scripting language? What does that language offer that JS can’t match, and what trade offs does it make to get there? I suppose you’d have to write a hypothetical spec for dom APIs, etc that don’t exist in the target language, and then pretend to use it and see what the pain points/unexpected pleasures are.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Instead of complaining about `==` developers would complain about substitution rules :-P.
- timbit42 7y ago
  Should have been Scheme or Logo, although Tcl would be high on my list.
- thedance 7y ago
  MSIE scripting did and does support Tcl.
ohazi 7y ago
All of these quotes are from business/sales/marketing people, not from developers actually using the language, and about a third of the people quoted have clearly mistaken it for Java.
wslh 7y ago
JavaScript was used for very simple things when it was launched. Most pages used it for modifying button images when you hover or press a button, and for handling some web form operations. As others say JavaScript was very confusing, a programming language that was launched with Java in its name and to fill gaps in HTML limitations but there was no clear direction towards web app programming. Another confusing aspect was that Java was created for this purpose (to create web apps via applets). We should not forget Macromedia Flash, it was a very interesting option offering a better programming language but it was not an standard with an open source reference.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Actionscript 1: a simple little language that could only be entered via a huge dropdown menu Actionscript 2: basically Javascript, when I was writing stuff in AS2 my O'Riley pocket JS guide saw a lot more use than the pocket AS guide. Actionscript 3: completely ECMAScript4, Macromedia/Adobe was on the standards board for that, but then Mozilla went a different way, I think, it is a giant mess [1]. Also AS3 was a lot more verbose than AS2 which did not endear it to the people with one foot in art and one in programming that was a large part of Flash's user base. 1: https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/ https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/
  - wslh 7y ago
    In conjuntion with AS Flash offered animation capabilities that were impossible at the time. This animations are from 2000: http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html
  - bdefore 7y ago
    As your source indicates, it was Microsoft that stonewalled ES4. By the time Adobe agreed to let it die, it was a capitulation that they had been vetoed.
- type0 7y ago
  Flash embraced ActionScript (ECMAscript 4) when no-one did and ultimately it also killed it. This is like some tree that allows the strangler fig to grow on it.
ww520 7y ago
The language Self was just released couple years before that and I thought it was the coolest language since sliced bread. Then Javascript came out and wow, it incorporated the key ideas from Self.
nabla9 7y ago
JavaScript is perfect example of Worse is Better http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Early JavaScript sucked bad. It sucked small planets. As PG said 2005 about Web 2.0. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html >Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works."
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  I don't think it is. If JS had any sane competition, I think it would have lost. By some weird conjunction of events, it landed a monopoly on the most amazing plateform in the world. PHP is a good example of Worse is Better, because it won over the competition, despite its flaws. HTML vs xHTML as well. Bash, maybe? But JS didn't win. It was the only one there.
  - yen223 7y ago
    What? JS had loads of competition back then. VBScript, Flash, and Java applets, just to name a few ways to get interactivity on a browser.
    - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      "sane" is the keyword here. The alternative all depended on non technical users with slow connections to install the runtime. Js code was guaranteed to work anywhere, and with no requirements, giving it practical monopoly.
SoylentOrange 7y ago
The article conflates “popular” with “loved”. JS is popular because it’s the only* language in which it’s possible to write browser apps and extensions. The number of people using transpilers for this purpose is minimal. In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible, instead using TS or other languages that compile down to JS. Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular is like saying people love McDonald’s because it sells the most burgers [*] since we don’t have Java applets or Flash apps anymore. Writing in other languages still means transpiling to JS in the end
- danShumway 7y ago
  > In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible Eh... if this was actually true, the web would look very different. I just can't square "web programmers hate Javascript" with "web programmers are obsessed with SPAs/CSS-in-JS/NodeJS backends/etc..." > Writing in other languages still means transpiling to JS in the end I'm assuming you already know about WASM, but if you don't, the future is starting to look relatively optimistic for other languages on the web. Still some problems to solve, but C++/Rust already have pretty promising toolchains working today.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mr_toad 7y ago
  > Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular I’m sure it gets a lot of hate just because of its dominance.
- Domenic_S 7y ago
  > is like saying people love McDonald’s because it sells the most burgers Ok I give up, why is this wrong?
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    The 101 is the busiest freeway in the Valley, but I doubt many people love it...
rafaelvasco 7y ago
JS was unusable for me before ES6. Hated it back then. Then ES6 came, and it finally became usable, though not great. Types are still missing, apart from several little things. There's Typescript but something native to the language would be preferable;
jackallis 7y ago
This obviously lends the question, given it's criticism back in the day, which PL is the next javascript?
- edtechdev 7y ago
  Maybe it depends on what's the next platform. C/C++ was sort of a base programming language for desktop apps, javascript for the browser, and Objective C & Java for mobile. Server apps have been a mix of PHP/python/java/ruby/node.js. I guess my 2 wild guesses for the long-term future might be either or both 1) a visual/block programming tool (which perhaps might perhaps be more usable in virtual reality type environments) or 2) natural language programming (programming in English and/or other natural languages), which might be more usable in both virtual reality and chat environments.
  - anthk 7y ago
    So, Smalltalk/Pharo.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Do you mean "heavily criticized, with significant flaws, but might grow into something with massive use"? Go, maybe? Or is it not flawed enough and not criticized enough? Or is it already used too heavily?
  - clarry 7y ago
    Not flawed enough, not criticized enough, and not growing into massive use. It's got its niche but there seems to be some competition.
- krapp 7y ago
  Any language that compiles to WASM.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Find a runtime environment that will ship on every major device this year. Any language that can (relatively) cleanly target that runtime could be the next JavaScript in 10 years. But your question is equivalent to “what Nation could be the next United States”. Possible serious answers to your question... which language might be on every device in 10 years... some successor to Solidity might Trojan horse it’s way in. If Facebook built a, like, a “Facebook Platform” or something like that, that could be on every device. Other than that, it’s hard to imagine. JavaScript came from an era of global platforms. That’s over, now we’re in the era of fractured platforms. I don’t think we’ll see another global platform in a long time. It would need a major new selling point (like Solidity has) that can’t be replicated on existing platforms.
perl4ever 7y ago
"“Paper Software plans to use JavaScript as the glue which lets our development partners couple Java, plug-ins, and Paper’s multi-dimensional VRML user interfaces within a distributed, online application.”" These quotes don't sound right. I was working for an ISP around 1995ish and telling people how to set up Trumpet WinSock and MacTCP and Internet Explorer. Java wasn't even public yet, was it? Someone wanted an interactive web page, so I used Perl and CGI. "JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave, where it can be rendered, animated and made into live interactive multimedia for the Internet." Live interactive multimedia? At 3.6KB/s? I remember a T1 (24 simultaneous calls) being a big deal, now my phone seems to have about 40 times the bandwidth. A lot of familiar stuff came out around that general time, but it didn't spring forth fully formed. Someone was creating what would become eBay at the time too, but that doesn't mean it was a thing yet. Maybe these are all genuine quotes, but they feel like they are from someone who thinks of 1995, 1998, 2002, etc. as all being "a long time ago".
davidjnelson 7y ago
Lol document.write in a table in Netscape 2. Still remember my first experience with a buggy js implementation :-) My favorite early js story is writing a “life cycle of stars” app in 4 hours in 1997 and getting a full high school semester worth of credit for it :-)
chadlavi 7y ago
> “AT&T’s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology — it is support for an open standards process. Open standards are and will be as important to the success of the Internet as open connectivity.” Still true, but ironic to hear a huge telco monopoly say it.
cronix 7y ago
I'm sure they would all love how far it's gotten. Like, on the Medium site that we're reading this on, how they help google track you with JS by using google sign on nagging you every damn time you visit to sign in with whatever account you're currently signed into google in, in any of their services.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
For me the most interesting part of the article is how virtually all the influential companies being quoted have disappeared. America Online, Architex (who?), Computer Associates (haven't heard that one in a while), DEC, HP (still around but a shadow of its former self), Iconovex (?), Illustra (?), Informix (acquired by IBM), Macromedia (eaten by Adobe), Metrowerks (?), SCO, SGI, Sybase, ...
- kls 7y ago
  Sad part is I remember them all, it was the best of times it was the worst of times. Be thankful you don't know who Computer Associates is. They are the grim reaper of software. Their model is buy aging software and milk the licences to death before the software is completely dead. Think Oracle with no initial innovation that distinguished them from any other IT mega-corp back then. Metroworks built dev tooling and IDE's the where big on Mac's back in the day and they where awesome for their time.
  - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
    Computer Associates is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. They changed their name at some point to CA Technologies and ended up being acquired by Broadcom sometime around the end of 2018/2019. Another fun fact is that they had a huge accounting scandal around the dotcom crash involving a 35 day month! They ended up settling for around 300kk USD. Edit: They settled for 225kk USD. Sanjay got 12 years in prison and an 8kk USD fine.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
I note that all those ecstatic quotes are from executives. Because the way I remember it, technical people hated it with a passion, from its design to its implementation. In fact, the most popular JS projects have always been to avoid writing ES5, its DOM API, or depending of one of its implementation: - scriptaculous: we hate even the basic types, so we monkey patch our own code into it. - jquery: don't use any of the language paradigms and use ones from Lisp and Haskell. Avoid "this". Don't touch the DOM. In fact, don't code, just make a few calls and pass parameters. And we rewrite the whole damn browser API to avoid incompatibilities. - GWT: write JS from Java. - underscore and co: let's rewrite typeof, the equality sign and array manipulation methods. And provide an stdib for god sake. - coffeescript: we like Python and ruby but must do JS. - React: HTML in JS now please. And magic DOM. Oh, and prototyping is horrible, lets use classes. And we strongly advice immutability, but do what you please... - webpack and babel: ES6 and 7 are not here yet, but ES5 is so bad we will setup an entire ecosystem dedicated to make believe they are. Also pretend import works like in other languages. - typescript: ok, we were wrong, ES7 is not enough. Not nearly enough. Please make intellisense works. Now, in 2020, JS is finally not so horrible to work with. You can use map(), () => and "..." and fake namespaces. Which is amazing to access the crazy cool plateforms that the modern browsers and the web are. So I guess, in a way, this quote from the AOL guy was true.
- thiht 7y ago
  I don't understand the comparison between jQuery and lisp/Haskell, can you elaborate?
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    For Haskell, when doing: $("foo").stuff().bar().res() jQuery feels like the list monad, if you see chaining as similar to bind and $() not so far from return. And for Lisp, jquery provided error handlers instead of relying on native try/except. Of course, it's more inspired from it than the real thing, but it's far from any JS paradigm of the time. Remember that JS didn't even have map() and the only place you used your first class functions was to setInterval. Plus the joke is funnier that way :)
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I wonder what Brendan Eich actually thought about it at the time, I mean he had and did do it pretty quickly. Was he actually thinking this will be really cool and people will need it or was he thinking stupid pointy haired bosses, we should use applets! I mean the quality he did put into it argues for he thought it was really cool, but perhaps he is so much of a craftsman he wouldn't put in less effort on something he considered to be a bad idea (unfortunately not many people have this admirable quality
cryptica 7y ago
Based on those comments, it seems that a lot of vendors saw JavaScript as an integration opportunity to sell their database software. It's interesting that it didn't work out that way and JS today mostly interacts with databases via intermediary server software.
ptah 7y ago
It was also the scripting language for Netscape's web server
goto11 7y ago
It is pretty clear none of them have any clue what JavaScript actually is. These are "endorsements" from "partners" trying to get on the hype train. They just want to ensure everybody that this new thing is a perfect fit for their product. "JavaScript allows Internet applications to easily connect to production databases such as CA-OpenIngres" "We plan to integrate our automatic document indexing and abstracting technology to leverage the power and functionality of JavaScript. " "Illustra’s unique extensible Object-Relational architecture makes it an ideal intelligent queryable store for content management applications using Java and JavaScript objects" "JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave" "The creation of a general, standard scripting language for Java development will accelerate adoption of this new, exciting technology for delivering dynamic, live content to the consumer." You could replace "JavaScript" with "Machine Learning" or "Blockchain" in the above quotes, and they would make just as much sense.

140 points by philnash 7y ago

jbob2000 7y ago

Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

danaliv 7y ago
Yeah, this is all marketing/partnership fluff. I'd be much more interested in seeing flame wars from Usenet. :) I was programming back then but I don't remember what the sentiment was at the time. I just remember Microsoft insisting on calling it "JScript" or "ActiveScript" or something because they didn't want to give Java any mindshare over ActiveX.
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  Yep. IE went so far as to add support for VBScript (a language based on visual basic) to compete.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    I now wish there'd be actual Python on the web.
    - badsectoracula 7y ago
      I haven't tested it and it might not work in a recent IE, but at least at the past IE used ActiveScript so any ActiveScript language could be used. Python can be installed as an ActiveScript engine and used via IE. The same applies with other languages too (e.g. Perl, Ruby, etc).
danmg 7y ago
It was not well liked. The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation. Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.
- jherdman 7y ago
  This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    With TypeScript and async/await papering over its greatest sins and inconveniences, it's not half bad.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Not only that, for years afterwards the techie crowd and equivalent of places like HN (I suppose I am mostly talking about slashdot) had a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, etc. I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like gmail in 2004 were a turning point.
  - LandR 7y ago
    >a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, I still feel like this.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new normal.
l33tman 7y ago
As far as I can remember, people didn't really think much about it, after all without all the modern libraries the language was useless, and browsers were only marginally able to run Active-X and Java stuff anyway so people weren't even into the mindset that "this new language could be used to write web apps". To me as a regular user, JavaScript was only there to do annoying popups at the start. Funny how some things never change...
commandlinefan 7y ago
Back then, most all the Javascript you ever saw was client-side form validation. Single-page-apps were still a long way off, so all web apps were built in form submission style: the user fills out some form data, it gets sent to the server, the server tells them they filled it out wrong and re-presents the form to the user. You could make that a little more user-friendly by having Javascript validate the form _before_ the users submitted it: but you had to validate it again on the server side because the user might have Javascript turned off, or might be a hacker. That meant that, for most web developers, Javascript just meant extra work: you had to duplicate your form-validation logic in a very finicky, untestable, untyped programming language. Browser makers were working on adding some flashier stuff like drop-down menus and image rollovers, but they didn’t work across different browsers (all both of them), so even the few people who did know how to use the extensions were encouraged not to. It seemed like everybody who could avoid Javascript did - I can’t really for the life of me understand how the early Javascript developers actually got anything done in it. It was a really painful way to develop software until maybe ten years ago.
keithnz 7y ago
it was something to do very simple things to enhance websites usability. I don't really remember anyone particularly liking it. It was something you tended to learn as little of in a very reluctant way. More exciting was things like Java applets or Flash. I did a bunch of stuff with Java applets and was quite impressed in 95-96 when java first came out. I wrote some simple 2d games (falling block puzzle games) which got semi popular. No way to do that in the js world at the time.
blablabla123 7y ago
I remember doing a tutorial from a computer magazine in the 90s. The article was presenting the basic features like for, while, if... So I thought wow, now I can program stuff in the web browser. The tutorial was then starting with hands-on code, like document.writeln("Hello world!"); Seems quite a natural thing to do when coming from other languages. But after playing around with it for an afternoon, I came to the conclusion: that's too difficult, I rather spend my time on something else. (If I remember correctly, at that time I was comfortable with Basic and had a little exposure to C++ and Pascal)

pier25 7y ago

The GIFs are the best part

echelon 7y ago
I'm actually very disappointed in the gifs. Most of the memes are faux retro. The fiji water bottle is representative of the vaporwave aesthetic from 2016 or so. The font animation is also super modern, circa early 2010s. It's all fake. They should have pulled more stuff from Geocities archive. This is not how things were.

aazaa 7y ago

The release of JavaScript was deeply confusing to me as a developer back then. Java applets and Macromedia Flash were already touted by their vendors as the one true way forward for interactivity. The scripting language released at about the same time seemed like an oddball. It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well. It was extremely slow, limiting the complexity of what could be built with it. There were problems galore with cross-browser compatibility of what was written. There was no reliable vector graphics or canvas system, so you really couldn't do much graphically. The DOM interface was hard to understand to be charitable. It didn't run outside of the browser, so how dare you call yourself a developer if you were using it? To the extent that developers knew JavaScript existed at all, it was not considered a programming language. These things started to change in the early 2000. So deeply ingrained with the disgust for JavaScript, that it took a very long time for the consensus to emerge that you could actually build very complex software on a post-V8 runtime.

shados 7y ago
I remember dealing with JS early on the same way I deal with bash today. With all the weird apis no one understood at the time, limited internet resources (and even books at first), it was just a crazy quest to hunt someone who knew what to do, copy it, and try to tweak it (usually unsuccessfully) until something kind of sortoff does what you want.
reflectiv 7y ago
Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was even possible. After Gmail...things really started to move in the javascript world...people started to put effort into both the runtimes and the libraries.
- monocasa 7y ago
  And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.

myhf 7y ago

No printf. Less keywords than Java. Lame.

bloopernova 7y ago
Being downvoted by people that don't know their Slashdot+iPod history: https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
kazinator 7y ago
Sibling comment identifies obscure Slashdot meme from 2001. Have an upvote.
doctor_eval 7y ago
CmdrTaco will never live this down.
- cmdrtaco 7y ago
  You have no idea.

ConcernedCoder 7y ago

To be fair, I didn't start programming in JavaScript until 2000, but even back then I could see that it would be a game changer for the web.

qubex 7y ago

I vividly remember working on my school’s website in 1997 with Microsoft FrontPage. I had built a rather complicated system where it would be possible to arrive at the same page from several origins. Whereas most web-pages had hyperlinks or allowed the user to use the “Back” button on the browser. I decided I was going to have none of that amateur stuff or reliance on what is now referred to as “browser chrome” (though if the term even existed back then, I surely wasn’t aware of it). So I looked into this JavaScript thing, and wrote my first ever script embedded into a button: onclick=“javascript.history.go(-1)” I was so proud of myself. For about a year users of my school’s website were visibly amazed.

rdiddly 7y ago

Wow, apparently JavaScript was 100% great and there was nothing at all negative about it ever, according to people in tech!

steego 7y ago
That's because they hadn't used it yet. :) In all seriousness, everyone was in on Java. Even Microsoft (Everyone was in on Java, even Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B). So most of us saw browser plugins and applets as the future, and some of those plug-ins were very impressive in those days. JavaScript was seen as a glue language to manipulate components built in better languages. We thought there was going to be a rich component marketplace that was going to be embedded in web pages. We didn't think we'd still be mucking around with HTML and DOM manipulations.
- tabtab 7y ago
  I also thought Java was the future. But, Java tried to be an entire virtual OS, and gained too many security holes because of that. Flash had a similar fate. It's not that JavaScript solved that, it's that it's built into the browser such that you can't really skip it. Like the Java and Flash engine, a web browser is also a fat bloated leaky client. However, if you toss the first two, you are then dealing with 1 fat client instead of 3 fat clients. It's easier to keep 1 FC up to date than 3.
  - steego 7y ago
    Do you think the security holes killed Java and Flash? Or do you think they were just nails in the coffin? I suspect performance and inconsistent experience killed Java applets and Sun stopped caring about desktop Java when they realized they can't make much money off it. Flash stuck around a lot longer than Java because it was fast, fun and ran consistently. It still lingered for some time after Jobs poisoned it. Honestly, I don't think people cared that much about running updates. For most people, if the computer tells them they need to update, they update. I also don't think average users cared about security issues back then.

russellbeattie 7y ago

I think that for consumer applications, JavaScript took a while to be really useful - like someone else noted Gmail was the first serious JS app I can think of. But for Intranets, it was pretty essential pretty quickly as web apps took over from Lotus Notes, Access databases, a million dBase applications and other proprietary front ends. And Microsoft was pushing it (and VBScript) hard in Internet Explorer under the DHTML moniker. In 1999 I worked on a contract for Levi's in SF and clearly remember using JavaScript to pull data from a huge hierarchy of product styles and presenting it to the end user as a widget where they could add/remove/move entries around. I remember abusing the cookies API to save the latest client state between page refreshes as it was the only real way to do that at the time. Something like this would have been a total pain in the ass without logic in the browser. In fact, I may have been replacing some sort of Java Applet or ActiveX widget which did something similar in a slower, less flexible way. So whether it was a huge success outside of corporations or not, I was using it to make a living pretty much from day one.

johannes1234321 7y ago
First proper JavaScript apps were Firefox/Netscape 9/Thunderbird where the user interface was done in JavaScript+XUL, while not being loaded from a server and most logic was done in C++.

projektfu 7y ago

I couldn't make heads nor tails of it when it debuted. But I was only 17. This article brings me back to a time when every product had a bunch of these "empty suit" quotes about it. The person never said that stuff, it was all written for them. I remember being on a project where marketing fluff was "said" by someone who had no idea what was going on and, besides, the product wasn't doing anything, let alone what he claimed the technology enabled it to do.

btilly 7y ago

JavaScript is a fascinating example of Microsoft successfully getting a giant own goal. The promise of the web was cross platform applications that required no installation. Microsoft's fear was that cross platform applications would make the operating system irrelevant and reduce Windows lock-in. Both Sun (with Java) and Netscape wanted Microsoft's worst fears to happen. This was the era of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. So Microsoft embraced the web and added a variety of extensions that only worked on Internet Explorer and Windows. The browser wars followed, which Microsoft resoundingly won. Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft applications using various Microsoft extensions. One of those applications was Microsoft Outlook. Which needed to poll the server and find out if there was new mail. For that purpose they wrote the first version of the XmlHttpRequest object. This was in 1999 and they thought nothing more of it...until gmail and then Google Maps came out in 2004 and demonstrated what could be done with it. The next thing you know, everyone is talking AJAX. Mozilla makes the web accessible to the world. And then Google decided to throw serious energy into a better JavaScript runtime (aka V8) because they wanted to be able to write more sophisticated applications. And the result is that Microsoft's nightmare has now been realized. But none of it could have happened without that fateful decision to supply the missing piece for a ton of applications of having an asynchronous way to go back for more data without loading another web page.

interestica 7y ago
I've been listening to the podcast 'Cautionary Tales' about the unintended consequences of certain actions. This seems like it would fit well as a great story.
majormajor 7y ago
> Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft applications using various Microsoft extensions. IE ran on Mac but, in a super-fun fashion, wasn't exactly the same IE, IIRC. There was a period, pre-Camino (Mozilla fork before Firebird/Firefox for Mac got good), pre-Safari, where IE was the single best browser for Macs, yet still wasn't as good as IE on PC...

billziss 7y ago

I wrote my first website in 1995 and started using Javascript in 1996 (only I think it was called Livescript back then)? I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it. (Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!) My opinion of Javascript has not improved over the years. I worked with Javascript for a while and in complex enough problems that my name ended up on 2-3 patents and patent applications. I no longer work on the web, but I have occasional need for Javascript and I always hate my time with it. This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant.

phillipkang 7y ago
I think the accessibility of web browsers and npm allowed the JavaScript ecosystem to explode, hence it's staying power.
jiofih 7y ago
Why do you hate it? It’s one of the friendliest languages in current use, a nice mix of OO and FP, with top-notch tooling everywhere, and incredible performance for an interpreted language.
8bitsrule 7y ago
> I think it was called Livescript back then)? As Encyclopedia Brittanica (!! who'd have thought) puts it, JavaScript was developed in 1995 at Netscape Communications Corp. and was conceived of as a companion to Java. It was originally called Mocha and then LiveScript before Netscape received a marketing license from Sun.[0] And then it became 'a dialect of ECMAScript'... [0] https://www.britannica.com/technology/JavaScript https://www.britannica.com/technology/JavaScript
gwbas1c 7y ago
> This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant. If you're going to do in browser development, what choice so you have? I can understand server-side JavaScript, mostly to avoid cognitive load from learning two languages. Otherwise, I think WebAssembly is a lot more promising of a technology.

tobyhinloopen 7y ago

I loved building JavaScript apps when JavaScript wasn’t cool yet. (2006-2010)

unreal37 7y ago
I built JavaScript apps in 1995-1996... Must have been extremely uncool then...

seemslegit 7y ago

Fast forward 25 years and we have three different semantics for "not a thing"

xenomachina 7y ago

When JavaScript first came out, it couldn't do much. Aside from toys (eg: scrolling text in the status bar) the "serious" uses were mostly: - (hopefully redundant) client-side validation - some styling (CSS was also brand new) - basic animation (eg: changing the on-hover appearance of stuff) - form "tweaking" (eg: disabling/hiding parts of a form dynamically based on other field values). It wasn't really for writing apps in, just for adding small enhancements to apps that did their real work server-side.

rathel 7y ago

I wonder what the alternative reality could be in which browsers adopted Tcl instead.

cnasc 7y ago
That might be an interesting counterfactual for a blog post (or series). What if {x} had been the dominant web scripting language? What does that language offer that JS can’t match, and what trade offs does it make to get there? I suppose you’d have to write a hypothetical spec for dom APIs, etc that don’t exist in the target language, and then pretend to use it and see what the pain points/unexpected pleasures are.
badsectoracula 7y ago
Instead of complaining about `==` developers would complain about substitution rules :-P.
timbit42 7y ago
Should have been Scheme or Logo, although Tcl would be high on my list.
thedance 7y ago
MSIE scripting did and does support Tcl.

ohazi 7y ago

All of these quotes are from business/sales/marketing people, not from developers actually using the language, and about a third of the people quoted have clearly mistaken it for Java.

wslh 7y ago

JavaScript was used for very simple things when it was launched. Most pages used it for modifying button images when you hover or press a button, and for handling some web form operations. As others say JavaScript was very confusing, a programming language that was launched with Java in its name and to fill gaps in HTML limitations but there was no clear direction towards web app programming. Another confusing aspect was that Java was created for this purpose (to create web apps via applets). We should not forget Macromedia Flash, it was a very interesting option offering a better programming language but it was not an standard with an open source reference.

egypturnash 7y ago
Actionscript 1: a simple little language that could only be entered via a huge dropdown menu Actionscript 2: basically Javascript, when I was writing stuff in AS2 my O'Riley pocket JS guide saw a lot more use than the pocket AS guide. Actionscript 3: completely ECMAScript4, Macromedia/Adobe was on the standards board for that, but then Mozilla went a different way, I think, it is a giant mess [1]. Also AS3 was a lot more verbose than AS2 which did not endear it to the people with one foot in art and one in programming that was a large part of Flash's user base. 1: https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/ https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/
- wslh 7y ago
  In conjuntion with AS Flash offered animation capabilities that were impossible at the time. This animations are from 2000: http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html
- bdefore 7y ago
  As your source indicates, it was Microsoft that stonewalled ES4. By the time Adobe agreed to let it die, it was a capitulation that they had been vetoed.
type0 7y ago
Flash embraced ActionScript (ECMAscript 4) when no-one did and ultimately it also killed it. This is like some tree that allows the strangler fig to grow on it.

ww520 7y ago

The language Self was just released couple years before that and I thought it was the coolest language since sliced bread. Then Javascript came out and wow, it incorporated the key ideas from Self.

nabla9 7y ago

JavaScript is perfect example of Worse is Better http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Early JavaScript sucked bad. It sucked small planets. As PG said 2005 about Web 2.0. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html >Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works."

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
I don't think it is. If JS had any sane competition, I think it would have lost. By some weird conjunction of events, it landed a monopoly on the most amazing plateform in the world. PHP is a good example of Worse is Better, because it won over the competition, despite its flaws. HTML vs xHTML as well. Bash, maybe? But JS didn't win. It was the only one there.
- yen223 7y ago
  What? JS had loads of competition back then. VBScript, Flash, and Java applets, just to name a few ways to get interactivity on a browser.
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    "sane" is the keyword here. The alternative all depended on non technical users with slow connections to install the runtime. Js code was guaranteed to work anywhere, and with no requirements, giving it practical monopoly.

SoylentOrange 7y ago

The article conflates “popular” with “loved”. JS is popular because it’s the only* language in which it’s possible to write browser apps and extensions. The number of people using transpilers for this purpose is minimal. In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible, instead using TS or other languages that compile down to JS. Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular is like saying people love McDonald’s because it sells the most burgers [*] since we don’t have Java applets or Flash apps anymore. Writing in other languages still means transpiling to JS in the end

danShumway 7y ago
> In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible Eh... if this was actually true, the web would look very different. I just can't square "web programmers hate Javascript" with "web programmers are obsessed with SPAs/CSS-in-JS/NodeJS backends/etc..." > Writing in other languages still means transpiling to JS in the end I'm assuming you already know about WASM, but if you don't, the future is starting to look relatively optimistic for other languages on the web. Still some problems to solve, but C++/Rust already have pretty promising toolchains working today.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mr_toad 7y ago
> Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular I’m sure it gets a lot of hate just because of its dominance.
Domenic_S 7y ago
> is like saying people love McDonald’s because it sells the most burgers Ok I give up, why is this wrong?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  The 101 is the busiest freeway in the Valley, but I doubt many people love it...

rafaelvasco 7y ago

JS was unusable for me before ES6. Hated it back then. Then ES6 came, and it finally became usable, though not great. Types are still missing, apart from several little things. There's Typescript but something native to the language would be preferable;

jackallis 7y ago

This obviously lends the question, given it's criticism back in the day, which PL is the next javascript?

edtechdev 7y ago
Maybe it depends on what's the next platform. C/C++ was sort of a base programming language for desktop apps, javascript for the browser, and Objective C & Java for mobile. Server apps have been a mix of PHP/python/java/ruby/node.js. I guess my 2 wild guesses for the long-term future might be either or both 1) a visual/block programming tool (which perhaps might perhaps be more usable in virtual reality type environments) or 2) natural language programming (programming in English and/or other natural languages), which might be more usable in both virtual reality and chat environments.
- anthk 7y ago
  So, Smalltalk/Pharo.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Do you mean "heavily criticized, with significant flaws, but might grow into something with massive use"? Go, maybe? Or is it not flawed enough and not criticized enough? Or is it already used too heavily?
- clarry 7y ago
  Not flawed enough, not criticized enough, and not growing into massive use. It's got its niche but there seems to be some competition.
krapp 7y ago
Any language that compiles to WASM.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
Find a runtime environment that will ship on every major device this year. Any language that can (relatively) cleanly target that runtime could be the next JavaScript in 10 years. But your question is equivalent to “what Nation could be the next United States”. Possible serious answers to your question... which language might be on every device in 10 years... some successor to Solidity might Trojan horse it’s way in. If Facebook built a, like, a “Facebook Platform” or something like that, that could be on every device. Other than that, it’s hard to imagine. JavaScript came from an era of global platforms. That’s over, now we’re in the era of fractured platforms. I don’t think we’ll see another global platform in a long time. It would need a major new selling point (like Solidity has) that can’t be replicated on existing platforms.

perl4ever 7y ago

"“Paper Software plans to use JavaScript as the glue which lets our development partners couple Java, plug-ins, and Paper’s multi-dimensional VRML user interfaces within a distributed, online application.”" These quotes don't sound right. I was working for an ISP around 1995ish and telling people how to set up Trumpet WinSock and MacTCP and Internet Explorer. Java wasn't even public yet, was it? Someone wanted an interactive web page, so I used Perl and CGI. "JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave, where it can be rendered, animated and made into live interactive multimedia for the Internet." Live interactive multimedia? At 3.6KB/s? I remember a T1 (24 simultaneous calls) being a big deal, now my phone seems to have about 40 times the bandwidth. A lot of familiar stuff came out around that general time, but it didn't spring forth fully formed. Someone was creating what would become eBay at the time too, but that doesn't mean it was a thing yet. Maybe these are all genuine quotes, but they feel like they are from someone who thinks of 1995, 1998, 2002, etc. as all being "a long time ago".

davidjnelson 7y ago

Lol document.write in a table in Netscape 2. Still remember my first experience with a buggy js implementation :-) My favorite early js story is writing a “life cycle of stars” app in 4 hours in 1997 and getting a full high school semester worth of credit for it :-)

chadlavi 7y ago

> “AT&T’s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology — it is support for an open standards process. Open standards are and will be as important to the success of the Internet as open connectivity.” Still true, but ironic to hear a huge telco monopoly say it.

cronix 7y ago

I'm sure they would all love how far it's gotten. Like, on the Medium site that we're reading this on, how they help google track you with JS by using google sign on nagging you every damn time you visit to sign in with whatever account you're currently signed into google in, in any of their services.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

For me the most interesting part of the article is how virtually all the influential companies being quoted have disappeared. America Online, Architex (who?), Computer Associates (haven't heard that one in a while), DEC, HP (still around but a shadow of its former self), Iconovex (?), Illustra (?), Informix (acquired by IBM), Macromedia (eaten by Adobe), Metrowerks (?), SCO, SGI, Sybase, ...

kls 7y ago
Sad part is I remember them all, it was the best of times it was the worst of times. Be thankful you don't know who Computer Associates is. They are the grim reaper of software. Their model is buy aging software and milk the licences to death before the software is completely dead. Think Oracle with no initial innovation that distinguished them from any other IT mega-corp back then. Metroworks built dev tooling and IDE's the where big on Mac's back in the day and they where awesome for their time.
- rwmurrayVT 7y ago
  Computer Associates is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. They changed their name at some point to CA Technologies and ended up being acquired by Broadcom sometime around the end of 2018/2019. Another fun fact is that they had a huge accounting scandal around the dotcom crash involving a 35 day month! They ended up settling for around 300kk USD. Edit: They settled for 225kk USD. Sanjay got 12 years in prison and an 8kk USD fine.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

I note that all those ecstatic quotes are from executives. Because the way I remember it, technical people hated it with a passion, from its design to its implementation. In fact, the most popular JS projects have always been to avoid writing ES5, its DOM API, or depending of one of its implementation: - scriptaculous: we hate even the basic types, so we monkey patch our own code into it. - jquery: don't use any of the language paradigms and use ones from Lisp and Haskell. Avoid "this". Don't touch the DOM. In fact, don't code, just make a few calls and pass parameters. And we rewrite the whole damn browser API to avoid incompatibilities. - GWT: write JS from Java. - underscore and co: let's rewrite typeof, the equality sign and array manipulation methods. And provide an stdib for god sake. - coffeescript: we like Python and ruby but must do JS. - React: HTML in JS now please. And magic DOM. Oh, and prototyping is horrible, lets use classes. And we strongly advice immutability, but do what you please... - webpack and babel: ES6 and 7 are not here yet, but ES5 is so bad we will setup an entire ecosystem dedicated to make believe they are. Also pretend import works like in other languages. - typescript: ok, we were wrong, ES7 is not enough. Not nearly enough. Please make intellisense works. Now, in 2020, JS is finally not so horrible to work with. You can use map(), () => and "..." and fake namespaces. Which is amazing to access the crazy cool plateforms that the modern browsers and the web are. So I guess, in a way, this quote from the AOL guy was true.

thiht 7y ago
I don't understand the comparison between jQuery and lisp/Haskell, can you elaborate?
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  For Haskell, when doing: $("foo").stuff().bar().res() jQuery feels like the list monad, if you see chaining as similar to bind and $() not so far from return. And for Lisp, jquery provided error handlers instead of relying on native try/except. Of course, it's more inspired from it than the real thing, but it's far from any JS paradigm of the time. Remember that JS didn't even have map() and the only place you used your first class functions was to setInterval. Plus the joke is funnier that way :)

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

I wonder what Brendan Eich actually thought about it at the time, I mean he had and did do it pretty quickly. Was he actually thinking this will be really cool and people will need it or was he thinking stupid pointy haired bosses, we should use applets! I mean the quality he did put into it argues for he thought it was really cool, but perhaps he is so much of a craftsman he wouldn't put in less effort on something he considered to be a bad idea (unfortunately not many people have this admirable quality

cryptica 7y ago

Based on those comments, it seems that a lot of vendors saw JavaScript as an integration opportunity to sell their database software. It's interesting that it didn't work out that way and JS today mostly interacts with databases via intermediary server software.

ptah 7y ago

It was also the scripting language for Netscape's web server

goto11 7y ago

It is pretty clear none of them have any clue what JavaScript actually is. These are "endorsements" from "partners" trying to get on the hype train. They just want to ensure everybody that this new thing is a perfect fit for their product. "JavaScript allows Internet applications to easily connect to production databases such as CA-OpenIngres" "We plan to integrate our automatic document indexing and abstracting technology to leverage the power and functionality of JavaScript. " "Illustra’s unique extensible Object-Relational architecture makes it an ideal intelligent queryable store for content management applications using Java and JavaScript objects" "JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave" "The creation of a general, standard scripting language for Java development will accelerate adoption of this new, exciting technology for delivering dynamic, live content to the consumer." You could replace "JavaScript" with "Machine Learning" or "Blockchain" in the above quotes, and they would make just as much sense.