35 ms·

Netscape and Sun Announce JavaScript (1995)

755 points by brandrick 6y ago

Kye 6y ago
Think of how the web would be different if Microsoft leaned its monopoly power on XMLHttpRequest. Would it have been the test case for API ownership instead of Java? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
- toyg 6y ago
  XHR is possibly Microsoft's "Xerox PARC" moment. They held the future in their hands and it just went through their fingers.
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    They also had VBScript and ActiveX in IE. I think had they held onto XHR it would have gone the same route, and a comparable alternative would have been developed.
_zamorano_ 6y ago
Remainder of how hard is realizing you're witnessing history.
brk 6y ago
I recall being at a local (Detroit) IT seminar around the time Javascript was announced, and some guy from Sun with an English accent going on and on about how safe javascript would be, since it couldn't access local resources and they had purposefully left out a lot of functions that could compromise the user. It's changed a bit since then, I'd say.
- Dangeranger 6y ago
  Being limited but safe may be the reason that JavaScript has won out over Java. As I recall, applets turned out to be a security nightmare.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Also, Javascript didn't require a compiler, and Java applets were notoriously slow.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I'm not sure JavaScript was any faster than Java at the time. I blame the failure of Java applets on Microsoft who deliberately undermined them.
      - meed2000 6y ago
        Applets suffered a spin up of the mini VM time. And applets couldn't affect the rendering of the html page, they had their own 'canvas'. I rather think JS was more appropriate as dev found more use in dynamically altering the very html markup that users saw, and after it was actually rendered.
      - cesarb 6y ago
        It was faster. A page with JavaScript loaded instantly, a page with Java locked up the whole browser for around a minute while the JVM started. (That was probably also the start of the "Java is slow" meme: anyone who had ever visited a page with a Java applet immediately learned to associate "Java" with "slow".)
      - toyg 6y ago
        JS was definitely faster, but it wasn't really used it in a modern sense anyway - just simple animations. MS definitely had a lot to do with Java applets failing though; after SUN fought to avoid being embraced/extinguished by VisualJ++, MS just pushed their own ActiveX tech to do the same thing, which was inevitably more performant (because it was based on COM+ and other Windows-specific innards).
  - toyg 6y ago
    Nah, Java applets lost because of the deployment nightmare they had become after MS was blocked in their attempt to coopt the language (they were barred from shipping incompatible JVMs, so they stopped shipping JVMs and Java IDEs altogether). ActiveX was winning, but that really was a security nightmare. Eventually enough of the useful parts of ActiveX crept into JS enough to build real stuff with it.
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  That's quite interesting. I think people will probably hear that and think poorly of today's more permissive JS, but it's worth mentioning that there wasn't much of a browser security model at that time. Browsers/pages weren't sandboxed, and there was no concept of "Allow site to do X?" like we have now. This lead to some iffy things with even early JS, such as allowing sites to set the user's homepage just by clicking a link.
flohofwoe 6y ago
Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent scripting language for web browsers JAVAscript truly demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of computing (at least the corporate side).
- pmarin 6y ago
  webASSEMBLY is not much better name.
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    Haha indeed, it could be worse though: JavaAssembly ;)
    - skocznymroczny 6y ago
      http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM
  - k__ 6y ago
    Maybe we get WASM CPUs in the future, haha.
    - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
      Well, HTML5 super computers are the future.
    - usrusr 6y ago
      Well, the next regularly scheduled Apple ISA switch is expected to be finished no later than 2035...
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Why wait when you can bring back Jazelle for WebAssembly?
thought_alarm 6y ago
8 months later, Microsoft would release VBScript.
- greenkey 6y ago
  Which became dominant for a while, but cgi scripts on the server-side were also hot. Enter Perl and PhP server-side. Then there was JSP, ASP, and ColdFusion, all server-side. Rails! Also server-side. Then back to JS.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Rails is like 10 years later tho... everything else you mentioned was already around by 2000.
    - greenkey 6y ago
      Rails 1 was released in 2004.
greenkey 6y ago
I wish Matz had been there with Rubyscript. JS wasn’t as powerful back then; it took over a decade for it to evolve enough where people would really use it for much other than client-side validation and neat UI tricks. In comparison, Ruby was a great language to use, and it would’ve grown more quickly.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I wish they’d just used scheme
  - colordrops 6y ago
    Exactly - rubyscript would have been just as hated as javascript; something like scheme or some other well designed language would have been better.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      I think we would just have got more Java applets. The idea of a programming language accessible to everyone did contribute a lot to its success.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - greenkey 6y ago
      That’s kind of harsh. Ruby was a great language and especially great syntax. Except for some duplication of methods and early misspelling of one or two methods, it would’ve been much easier for people to learn and do cool things with that didn’t happen in JS until years later. Scheme’s not bad, but I think if you compare The uptake of both, Ruby did better? (Not counting Lisp.) It was a cool language though; a lot of problems that would’ve been avoided, if people could type all the braces in correctly... for Lisp at least.
- toyg 6y ago
  Ruby was first released on the same year. Python had been around for 4 years already. What could have been, eh...
Rochus 6y ago
Wow, 25 years. Feels like yesterday, but several technological revolutions happened in these years.
- hu3 6y ago
  A quarter of a century. It's kind of mind blowing to me that PHP is as old as JavaScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP
newyorker2 6y ago
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. >JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. JS has come a long way in 25 years :-)
- ethbr0 6y ago
  >> can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications ... has it? ;-) (Note: joke with deference to the huge pool of incredibly talented js developers! But there are still a lot of mind bogglingly terrible js devs too)
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    I think that's something JS also shares with Java, no. A huge number of the people focusing in it are terrible devs.
    - snazz 6y ago
      It's popular and taught in schools, so I don't think this is really surprising.
      - lostcolony 6y ago
        Yeah, was not saying it was surprising. JS is basically required for frontend dev, and the number of bootcamps means a lot of supply, much of which is low grade. Java is super common for large projects at large companies where bad devs can basically be unnoticed, so little wonder there's so many poor Java devs at all levels of experience.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      The relative trajectories of Java and JavaScript over the years are fascinating. Java became a language that you can toss a 100-developers onto a project for, and incrementally grind out something that has a mostly-consistent architecture. Aka the perfect IBM Services language. JavaScript became a language you can toss up a SPA in a day from boilerplate glueing together frameworks and only writing the use-specific bits. Aka the perfect web developer language. As other commenter said, bad developers are probably a consequence of demand > supply for any language.
mseepgood 6y ago
> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly I didn't know that server-side JS was a thing back then.
- vesinisa 6y ago
  It wasn't. They basically predicted Node.js 15 years before its inception. EDIT: Okay, server-side JS indeed long predates Node.js. See below.
  - BigFatGuy 6y ago
    Netscape Enterprise Server executed server-side JavaScript ("SSJS") https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-5653-10/816-5653-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-5653-10/816-5653-10...
  - peteri 6y ago
    It was also an option for IIS as well as vbscript in classic ASP pages.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    It was. I developed sites using Netscape Livewire, the server side JS in Netscape Enterprise Server. It was probably closer to ASP and PHP scripting, mixing HTML, client-side JS, and server-side JS in the same file.
- rbg246 6y ago
  Think it was this (I am sure someone here will know better): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) Albeit it was two years after the announcement.
  - philo23 6y ago
    Yeah, I remember people talking about Rhino when node.js originally came out, saying things like it's been tried before and wouldn't catch on.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 6y ago
Damn, I was 7 at the time. And by the time I was 17, and just starting to build websites, it still felt like Javascript was barely a baby.
- k__ 6y ago
  I was 10 when it came out and wrote my first line of JS with 18 or something. It already felt dated to me at that time.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    I was....older....when it came out and so wrote my first Javascript code around 96. Actually back then it felt like a breath of fresh air. A way to run logic in the browser that interacted with HTML. Nobody saw it as a replacement to Java applets, Flash, Shockwave (anyone remember that plugin and Macromedia Director?), etc but it did open the door to make basic web pages a little more dynamic. Some time before 2000 (though I forget which year precisely) I even submitted some Javascript to Planet Source Code (anyone remember that website?) that simulated a Windows 95 desktop; complete with interactive start menu and task bar. That submission was the highest rated for that month and was awarded some free software as a prize -- though I never claimed that prize in the end. It's true that the early days of Javascript was rather lacklustre (not helped with the the IE/Netscape wars) and thus few people took it seriously as something that could displace Java applets nor Flash. But it was still widely used as something to make traditional web design a little more flexible (eg Javascript refreshes). Part of my actually misses those days. Web design was simpler in some ways (it was predominantly backend generated* HTML with JS sprinkled about sparsely). Though I don't miss browser incompatibilities -- even basic things like displaying a table (not a grid of divs, a literal <table>) was fraught with different browsers rendering the table differently. * and in fairness, I was always more of a backend engineer rather than frontend designer anyway
Orthw2020 6y ago
What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!
- jp555 6y ago
  Struggle sessions were still horrible Maoist actions back then, not the "progressive" thing some call for them to be today. :P
- netdur 6y ago
  For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Imagine a world without Javascript? What a dream.
    - Jean-Philipe 6y ago
      I'd be afraid flash would come back. Ah, those flashbacks...
      - grishka 6y ago
        Flash is better than JS to be honest. JS still hasn't caught up with ActionScript. The only bad part about Flash is that it's proprietary.
        recursive 6y ago
        When flash was focused, my keyboard shortcuts didn't work. I hated it just for that.
        grishka 6y ago
lr4444lr 6y ago
... and still looks like it hasn't aged a day in some ways. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something...
- hrafn 6y ago
  Note that the above link cannot be opened by clicking on it, the site redirects away request with a HackerNews referrer. Can still be opened by copying-and-pasting.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- echeese 6y ago
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/BigInt https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
- severak_cz 6y ago
  opening via right click to private window works
fuoqi 6y ago
I wonder in how many billions of dollars future generations will apprise this mistake.
- Reedx 6y ago
  Enough billions to make up trillions.
overkill28 6y ago
I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated. > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. Was this level of integration ever achieved? Did Java applets actually have a JS API? Or is this just corporate double speak.
- Azleur 6y ago
  Marketing move. Same reason they shoehorned constructors into a prototype based language. Java was all the rage in '95.
- Yaggo 6y ago
  Not only the name, but also the C-like syntax was borrowed from Java because of marketing reasons, despite the semantics were inspired by quite different languages such as Scheme and Self. What a pity!
- Tade0 6y ago
  > Did Java applets actually have a JS API? It was possible to expose something: https://www.codejava.net/java-se/applet/liveconnect-the-api-for-communication-between-java-applet-and-javascript https://www.codejava.net/java-se/applet/liveconnect-the-api-...
- bawolff 6y ago
  Yes, there was an api. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/LiveConnect https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/LiveCon... That said, the nomenclature was pure marketng bs.
- tbranyen 6y ago
  Definitely, HTML has several tags to help work with external types. You can interface with java, vbscript, flash, pdf, etc. You could absolutely expose top level methods and invoke them in JS.
forinti 6y ago
Such a shame that they didn't pick Scheme.
BasDirks 6y ago
This is an important document, because it disproves the prevalent notion that Java and JavaScript have nothing to do with each other. JavaScript has come a long way, to where the shame of any self-respecting engineer has been reduced to a bearable minimum!
- pluc 6y ago
  I wouldn't say bare minimum, JS still is all stupid about types.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  No, it actually proves the notion that Java and JavaScript having something to do with each other was just marketing bullshit.
Tade0 6y ago
I wrote my first actually-doing-something lines of code back in 2001 in JS, because unlike e.g. Pascal, JS (or actually JScirpt) would just run and not ask stupid questions about types or missing semicolons and required only a browser. 12-year-old me was very happy with such a low barrier to entry language, especially given that I didn't have an internet connection until years later, so I had to learn mostly via trial and error.
optimalsolver 6y ago
It doesn't have to be this way. Hopefully Brython[0] which lets you do client-side Python scripting takes off. Imagine doing full stack web dev without seeing a single line of JS. [0] https://brython.info/ https://brython.info/
- jfoster 6y ago
  I love the idea. From experience, though, this type of thing becomes a bit painful when you realise that you actually want to use some of the tools & code from the javascript world.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  That's just replacing one passable scripting language with another passable scripting language, just with worse performance. I don't see the point.
- niek_pas 6y ago
  Brython has been around for _years_ now and AFAIK has not shown any signs of taking off. I think you're better off placing your bets on newer ECMAscript features and full-conversion libraries like React.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  I think building apps in Rails/Opal is just as likely. Seriously though, I'm putting a lot of hope in the LiveView/Stimulus Reflex/etc approach.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  I very much prefer modern JavaScript compared to Python. It's faster, has a better async support, as powerful, and I don't have to care about white space.
brightball 6y ago
It’s funny seeing this. Yesterday I had to demo my 20 year old built in desk and found a Netscape Navigator CD inside.
bangtoyib 6y ago
nice
sturza 6y ago
We have to go back Marty!
- toyg 6y ago
  "Hey you, take your damn javascript off her..."
blablabla123 6y ago
> complementary to and integrated with Java That didn't go so well. It's well integrated with Webkit at least ;)
doublerabbit 6y ago
It's a shame too that TCL wasn't chosen to be the script of choice.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  There was a whole war about that, in which Sun originally supported TCL (having hired John Ousterhout), that was started by RMS firing the first shot ("Why you should not use TCL"), but which TCL eventually lost. The Tcl War (1994) (vanderburg.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html John Ousterhout's classy reply: https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html Personally, I was on the side of ScriptX at the time (essentially object oriented scheme with a more traditional syntax and a nice multimedia class library including QuickTime), but it wasn't mature or open enough at the time, and we lost too: ScriptX and the World Wide Web. "Link Globally, Interact Locally". By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX The real tragedy is that the script of choice for the web was't Lua: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 by DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 [–] Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API." http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
victor106 6y ago
> today announced JavaScript, an open, cross-platform object scripting language Those words “open source” and “cross platform” are still in vogue today. That’s just amazing for an industry that changes every year and in the land of JS every month.
joe_momma 6y ago
Google where is your doodle honoring 25 years of javascript
siggi_pop 6y ago
That's funny cause I announced a poo in pot that day.
bisRepetita 6y ago
>Oracle Corporation Mark Benioff: (415) 506-7000
desmap 6y ago
OT: I recently learned C++ after doing JS/TS for years. This was an eye-opener because there were so many similarities which JS inherited from C/C++. Plus stuff I've seen in other languages and environments. After this, I thought that everybody should learn C/C++ at school, it's like Latin to other languages (I learned Turbo Pascal at school and didn't like how it handled pointers and its overall elaborative style).
- vips7L 6y ago
  C/C++ isn't a language! They're completely separate.
  - desmap 6y ago
    I know this very well, still both have similarities to JS and eventually, C++ evolved from C. No need to be snarky.
atum47 6y ago
I bought a book, when I was about 12-15 years old, called DHTML (Dynamic HTML). It blew my mind to see things moving across the screen with just code. Keep in mind that I learned pure html when I was 10, my websites were all very static (apart from a animated GIF here and there). The only way you could do a cool menu, effect or animation, was with Java Applet (which I learned after purchasing a online Java course that was taught over ICQ - it doesn't get more 90's than that). I have this love relationship with javascript ever since I wrote my first "alert('hello')" and I wish it a happy birthday with many more years to come.
- bdickason 6y ago
  I remember this book! I think it was red with a yellow font maybe? Agree with you on the alert(‘hello’) :)
  - atum47 6y ago
    Turns out I still have my copy[1]. I remember this guy[2] blowing my mind. He would move his arms to a menu, where your mouse hover. This whole book was a thrill for me. 1 - https://imgur.com/a/qMsw11C https://imgur.com/a/qMsw11C 2 - https://imgur.com/a/kZKyhok https://imgur.com/a/kZKyhok
- arendtio 6y ago
  It still bothers me when people talk about dynamic HTML these days. Just two weeks ago some team lead said it and I thought 'dude, that is so 90s'.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    It's also probably incorrect; DHTML didn't involve loading data via AJAX after the page loaded, but instead configuring the webpage on the client side after loading it. That said, ask them if they'd prefer the backend in PHP or Coldfusion.
    - MentallyRetired 6y ago
lioeters 6y ago
Related - A project posted earlier today: Mocha1995 - The world's first JavaScript engine written in 1995 by Brendan Eich, now compiled back to JS and WASM https://github.com/doodlewind/mocha1995/blob/main/blog/about.md https://github.com/doodlewind/mocha1995/blob/main/blog/about... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300698
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I remember this, when the HTML chats didn't need to be manually refreshed anymore... I still test with Netscape 2.0 out of respect, and some JS features work with it on my site. The Web is just amazing, I can write across 25 years of platforms from a dozen different vendors, totally unrelated, and it works in all of them!
tomhoward 6y ago
I didn't realise JS only appeared in late '95. I first used the web in early-mid '95; it must've been around April-May of that year. I'm no JS-hater, but it's still nice to think I had a brief few months of script-free web use before the JS era dawned.
nonesuchluck 6y ago
Not being on the web until the late 90s, the part I've never figured out is, what could you actually _do_ with JavaScript in the initial versions? The way I understand it, early JavaScript could only address HTML forms, links, and images. Can't modify HTML tags. Can't insert new elements. Can't update the page and re-render until DHTML in the version 4 browsers. Can't query the network until XHR. Ok, so now what? Do you just pop up an alert() when someone types 4 digits for a Zip code instead of 5? Image rollovers? Is that it?
- petercooper 6y ago
  Check out the JavaScript newsgroup from 1996 to see what people were discussing and trying to achieve :-) https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.javascript/search?q=after%3A1994-12-08%20before%3A1996-12-11 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.javascript/search?q=af...
- cygx 6y ago
  You could output HTML via document.write().
- gmac 6y ago
  As I recall you could do what felt like quite a lot by abusing image swapping and frames + document.write.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  One of the big things back then was form validation. Web pages in the late 90's were necessarily very form driven (no AJAX back then), and users were frustrated to submit a form, wait for a response, only to be told that they were missing a required input (or as you suggest, 4 digits for zip code). So there were complex frameworks to let Javascript validate the form before it was submitted - the Struts framework would even generate the Javascript for you and keep it synchronized with the backend. But yeah, there wasn't really a whole lot of functionality. You could do fancier things with the Layer API in Netscape, but it only worked in Netscape.
  - duxup 6y ago
thrower123 6y ago
What a disastrous day for the world.
cies 6y ago
Not my fav announcement. This funny (I think) video shows why: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat Disclaimer: I like types, I hate automatic casting.
- th0ma5 6y ago
  It is wild to revisit some of the inspiration of the kind of weaponized cynicism that hopefully we're getting away from. This talk was funny for sure, but it started a large amount of "computers are awful, look at what this stupid thing did" which was very harmful. Not because it isn't true, but because understanding why and how these things happen, dealing with and educated people surrounding these things, and trying to make things better is the goal (perhaps misplaced) of many in the industry. It is incredibly easy to just shit on things. Still a pretty funny talk for sure.
  - cies 6y ago
    > educat[ing] people surrounding these things hmmm... i see more and more schools/unis teaching JS to beginners. it's beginning to be more of an elephant in the room than a poor kid that's bullies all the time. isn't calling this "weaponized cynicism" a way to silence dissent against the mainstream? JS clearly is mainstream now.
    - th0ma5 6y ago
      I think proper disagreement and criticism can be had communicating directly. Framing it as knowing "how it really is" or appealing to a supposed common knowledge of a criticism is an unfair and disingenuous form of communication.
sradman 6y ago
> JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. This one document certainly captures the state of the software industry before it was transformed by the Web (then Mobile then Cloud). The vision of JavaScript being both server-side and “isomorphic” is clearly articulated but it was a convoluted road getting there. Let’s credit Google’s V8 and Node.js for making performant and concurrent/evented JavaScript ubiquitous. Netscape/Sun, Microsoft, and Sybase abandoned their server-side JavaScript efforts for Java/.net bytecode. Microsoft was the only relevant browser until Firefox rose from the flames like a phoenix. Linux and OSS software killed or maimed most of the companies mentioned.
divan 6y ago
Such a sad day for an industry! In a slightly different turn of events, web software ecosystem perhaps could be different from the pile of hacks on top of hacks it is now.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Java applets? Flash?
  - divan 6y ago
    I'm thinking mostly on a scenario where browsers could have a competition of existing languages (C, C++, Java, Lua, etc).
ibraheemdev 6y ago
Hopefully a few years/decades from now, we will be remembering the day WebAssembly was announced. [1] 1: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/150 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/150
DonHopkins 6y ago
I love how the company contacts at the end include so many phone numbers, only a few email addresses, and zero urls.
arendtio 6y ago
I wonder how many people rue that day (especially in the HN community) ;-)
- lta 6y ago
  I cannot express how much I rue this day.
rodolphoarruda 6y ago
Precisely the same time I used to think JS was a lighter version of the Java language.
shmerl 6y ago
They should have used the name LiveScript. Java in the name was a complete disaster.
coldtea 6y ago
No algebraic types. Less speed than Smalltalk. Lame.
edub 6y ago
it is interesting that the archive.org version of this press release has a semi-colon after AT&T; i can't remember if in 1995 we would write the code to be AT&T or if that came a bit later. perhaps the scraper thought it was an HTML entity starting with the & followed by the T and it added the semi-colon. or maybe it originally was posted in 1995 without the semi-colon and before it got indexed in 2002 by archive.org someone ran a regex style replacement on old static html files at netscape to "fix" html entities. it just doesn't seem likely that a static html file from 1995 would have had AT&T; in it, it seems more likely that it was transformed either by the scraper or some internal script run after it was originally posted. i found an old email version of the press release on Lunds University website that does not have the semi-colon. http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt and what looks like an archive of the 1995 version of the java website hosted at University of Oviedo: http://www6.uniovi.es/java-http/pr951204-03.html http://www6.uniovi.es/java-http/pr951204-03.html
- hcs 6y ago
  In the raw version of the archived page, found by adding "id_" after the URL[1], there is no semicolon. The link to netscape.com at the end is mysteriously missing still, "Additional information on Netscape Communications Corporation is available on the Internet at ," [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020606002913id_/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020606002913id_/http://wp.nets...
  - ignoranceprior 6y ago
    Does this mean the Wayback Machine has a bug relating to how it handles HTML entities?
  - edub 6y ago
    welp, I did not know that you could get the raw version. Thanks for the tip! It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312677
hokumguru 6y ago
Apparently this project was started the week that I was born, nice.
DonHopkins 6y ago
Reminds me of one of Microsoft's first Dynamic HTML demos: There were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site". When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site" button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before you could click it! Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site" button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse! Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)
- sneak 6y ago
  And thus the concept of the web permitting the site developers to actively make it harder or even impossible for the user to express their wishes was born. The first dark pattern on the web?
cicero 6y ago
I remember being very excited about this announcement. I had been learning about Java, but I only had an HP workstation, which ran HP-UX Unix at work, and a Macintosh at home. Neither of them had a Java implementation yet, but I could run Netscape Navigator with JavaScript. I gave an enthusiastic talk on JavaScript at the next meeting of our local Java Users Group. However, as I got to know the language better, my enthusiasm dwindled due to what I thought to be a strange type system. Also, I got access to Java implementations on HP-UX and Macintosh, so I never went back to JS. This has always limited my ability to do web front-ends, but now I'm looking to using Blazor for that.
jzer0cool 6y ago
My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others. When I think back IE browser was the top browser and there were all sorts of workarounds to get it html compliant (or rather IE compliant). Easy to learn html, but hard to get it working right. Then adding in javascript for the added dynamic flair. I wanted to learn javascript & I ended up learning first java not knowing the difference at the time. Fun times were also spent at Barnes & Nobles / Borders (bookstore in U.S.) - checking out technical books and eventually I toiled through learning VBScript / Windows IIS to extend out a simple ecommerce site and possibly paving my way into the technical field. Didn't Netscape also have email integration? I can't recall anymore as I went through multiple internet providers like Aol.
- godot 6y ago
  I find the fragmentation interesting. In the mid to late 90s when I was first on the internet, the "prominent search engines" ranked (given to me by my ISP and some other sites) was something like AltaVista, Yahoo, InfoSeek, with Webcrawler and Hotbot down at the bottom. I believe my ISP distributed IE (3 at the time) with whatever internet software cd they included, and it was my first and default browser. Later on I tried installing Netscape Navigator, but it felt slow and clumsy compared to IE3 at the time, so I never understood why anyone used it. It's quite interesting how our internet experiences were so different! What is the same between us however is I also learned coding practically by first starting to make HTML pages, and some Javascript, and that was also my way into the technical field (decade and a half of working as a software engineer now). Like, sure, there were computer programming classes in school and every class used Pascal at the time (Quick or Turbo). It didn't feel like creating anything useful for the real world though; whereas with the web, I was immediately creating something for the world to see. I'd say learning to make web pages on my own was 99% of the reasons I became a software engineer later. The programming classes in high school, not so much.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Thunderbird debuted as Netscape mail and was combined in Netscape Communicator suite I believe. Memory fuzzy.
tacotacotacos 6y ago
Complements Java?!? I guess it also complements Erlang.
jfb 6y ago
A date that will live in infamy.
Zelphyr 6y ago
I was just thinking the other day about how in late '95 I had just bought my first PC and was teaching myself web development and discovered JavaScript. I remember submitting bug reports to Sun. I hadn't realized until the other day, after calculating the timeline, just how new JavaScript really was at that point in time.
- Zelphyr 6y ago
  Correction: Submitting bug reports to Netscape.
annadane 6y ago
This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move
jamesdhutton 6y ago
Interesting to read the list of companies in the announcement, and to contemplate that JavaScript has outlived most of them.
brundolf 6y ago
What stands out to me is how much more foresight they had than I'd thought about the ways JS would be used: > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. We tend to think of JS as having started out as just a way to dynamically show/hide elements, maybe add an animation or two, on top of fundamentally HTML-based web pages. But I see here described what we now think of as "web apps", and even web servers (!) written in JS. They even talk about code-sharing on the front and back ends, a la React in hybrid-mode. I had no idea those things were in people's minds at its inception. Edit: Apparently they already ran JS on the server! I had no idea > Netscape LiveWire enables JavaScript programs to be installed, run and managed on Netscape servers
- drblast 6y ago
  The industry is cyclical and to be forward thinking all you have to do is describe what's already happened and assume it will happen again. ;-) The things being done with JavaScript today are not new, nor is the idea that a server and client would coordinate to run interactive apps. That fundamental concept has been reimplemented in many different ways until we've landed on the current rube goldbergian monstrosity that are web apps. It shows that the desire to have users interact with a service in particular ways will not go away. The technology used to do that is mostly irrelevant.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I'm not surprised that the architecture isn't new, I'm surprised that web apps were already being talked about this way using JS specifically. JS's early design flaws are often written off as, "well it was never intended to be a real programming language like it is today". But from reading this, that doesn't sound to be the case.
supernova87a 6y ago
I'm glad they added all the individual contact information at the bottom -- I'm going call up Mark Benioff at Oracle (415) 506-7000 to ask him how to download the source!
- kkotak 6y ago
  Yep, before the Paypal mafia, there was the Oracle mafia :)
  - xtracto 6y ago
    I think technology-wise, the Sun mafia were the cool kids. Or the Silicon Graphic mafia and even Microsoft. I was born in 1981, and the "cool" technology places to be when I was growing up were Microsoft, Sun and SiliconGraphics.
- mattl 6y ago
  That's just the main Oracle number I'm sure
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    I'm not sure, but I think he's no longer at Oracle.
    - mattl 6y ago
      Probably not
aproductguy 6y ago
I legit miss Sun. Worked there for two years in 2002/03, and the level of talent there was astounding.
samstave 6y ago
in 1997 Iworked at the first firm that adopted XML Was on a conf call with VPs from Sun, and i said, and I quote myself: "So youre telling me that you have this shitty b2b system that youre not happy with and you want us to implement XML to accomodate" and this VP was nixing it the whole time iwth "hand cut across the neck" manurisms... later I hired Dave Sifry - and had his team implement a b2b FTP between us and sun... I later went to him and stated " You should really make a linux support company" Linuxcare was founded, worth unicorn. I got nothing
spamizbad 6y ago
Anyone know what ever came of this?
didip 6y ago
Javascript was such a misopportunity to use Scheme instead. All three HTML, JS, and CSS could have used one Lisp-like dialect. Also, I remembered that JS was horribly misunderstood for a long time because people weren’t used to the prototypical inheritance. And this is where jQuery comes in and took JS to the next level.
- krapp 6y ago
  >All three HTML, JS, and CSS could have used one Lisp-like dialect. Other than being aesthetically pleasing to a demographic of programmers, what would be the benefit? Modern sites already have a problem with JS being used to generate CSS and HTML, and separation of concerns being completely abandoned, and that's just created a mess where three separate, more explicit languages were simpler.
- Wilem82 6y ago
  Lol god forbid. Browser side programming is shitty enough without lisp nonsense.
evan_ 6y ago
In the beginning JavaScript was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  > widely regarded as a bad move. By who? You? Because there’s tens (hundreds) of thousands of programmers and thousands of companies working on JavaScript. Just because many here consider JavaScript bad doesn’t mean everyone does. JavaScript has many problems, but it’s not “widely regarded” as bad.
  - Arnavion 6y ago
    (It's a quote from a popular book.)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - abruzzi 6y ago
    the OP is referencing a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      I’m an idiot. I should’ve picked that out...
  - evan_ 6y ago
    I love JavaScript, I spend 40 hours a week elbow-deep in the stuff, I'm just having some fun.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Thou art in a simulation and it is written in JavaScript
xtanx 6y ago
FYI the internet archive is currently having a 2-to-1 matching campaign. https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
cphoover 6y ago
This made me laugh... Like Java and Visual Basic a compliment to your applet
phendrenad2 6y ago
Here's hoping we can switch to webassembly before JS turns 30! We just need DOM manipulation. Come on Mozilla, I believe in you.
smithza 6y ago
It is fun considering I was not yet born yet when this came out. Most all of the SW languages I use are older than I am... python, C++, Java, JS, perl, elisp.
Snelius 6y ago
It was a sad day for the whole industry but nobody knew that yet.
anthk 6y ago
People forget one thing: instead of JS, TCL could've been the scripting language of the web.
HeavyStorm 6y ago
Wait, Sun? :o
viksit 6y ago
Did no one see Marc Benioff from Oracle listed as the original point of contact for the consortium of sponsors? :)) (and some others that went on to become industry stalwarts).
blackrock 6y ago
JavaScript is such a crappy programming language, that its only saving grace, is that people keep building other programming languages that transpiles down to it. So now, you have a poor language, with another layer of a different programming language. Is it any surprise that the web is so slow these days, with all these indirections?
stevefan1999 6y ago
"Ah, shit, here we go again"
cutler 6y ago
This seems to contradict the common assertion that Javascript and Java are unrelated. Interesting.
machinesbuddy 6y ago
As a complement to Java!?

755 points by brandrick 6y ago

Kye 6y ago

Think of how the web would be different if Microsoft leaned its monopoly power on XMLHttpRequest. Would it have been the test case for API ownership instead of Java? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

toyg 6y ago
XHR is possibly Microsoft's "Xerox PARC" moment. They held the future in their hands and it just went through their fingers.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  They also had VBScript and ActiveX in IE. I think had they held onto XHR it would have gone the same route, and a comparable alternative would have been developed.

_zamorano_ 6y ago

Remainder of how hard is realizing you're witnessing history.

brk 6y ago

I recall being at a local (Detroit) IT seminar around the time Javascript was announced, and some guy from Sun with an English accent going on and on about how safe javascript would be, since it couldn't access local resources and they had purposefully left out a lot of functions that could compromise the user. It's changed a bit since then, I'd say.

Dangeranger 6y ago
Being limited but safe may be the reason that JavaScript has won out over Java. As I recall, applets turned out to be a security nightmare.
- krapp 6y ago
  Also, Javascript didn't require a compiler, and Java applets were notoriously slow.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I'm not sure JavaScript was any faster than Java at the time. I blame the failure of Java applets on Microsoft who deliberately undermined them.
    - meed2000 6y ago
      Applets suffered a spin up of the mini VM time. And applets couldn't affect the rendering of the html page, they had their own 'canvas'. I rather think JS was more appropriate as dev found more use in dynamically altering the very html markup that users saw, and after it was actually rendered.
    - cesarb 6y ago
      It was faster. A page with JavaScript loaded instantly, a page with Java locked up the whole browser for around a minute while the JVM started. (That was probably also the start of the "Java is slow" meme: anyone who had ever visited a page with a Java applet immediately learned to associate "Java" with "slow".)
    - toyg 6y ago
      JS was definitely faster, but it wasn't really used it in a modern sense anyway - just simple animations. MS definitely had a lot to do with Java applets failing though; after SUN fought to avoid being embraced/extinguished by VisualJ++, MS just pushed their own ActiveX tech to do the same thing, which was inevitably more performant (because it was based on COM+ and other Windows-specific innards).
- toyg 6y ago
  Nah, Java applets lost because of the deployment nightmare they had become after MS was blocked in their attempt to coopt the language (they were barred from shipping incompatible JVMs, so they stopped shipping JVMs and Java IDEs altogether). ActiveX was winning, but that really was a security nightmare. Eventually enough of the useful parts of ActiveX crept into JS enough to build real stuff with it.
SquareWheel 6y ago
That's quite interesting. I think people will probably hear that and think poorly of today's more permissive JS, but it's worth mentioning that there wasn't much of a browser security model at that time. Browsers/pages weren't sandboxed, and there was no concept of "Allow site to do X?" like we have now. This lead to some iffy things with even early JS, such as allowing sites to set the user's homepage just by clicking a link.

flohofwoe 6y ago

Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent scripting language for web browsers JAVAscript truly demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of computing (at least the corporate side).

pmarin 6y ago
webASSEMBLY is not much better name.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Haha indeed, it could be worse though: JavaAssembly ;)
  - skocznymroczny 6y ago
    http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM
- k__ 6y ago
  Maybe we get WASM CPUs in the future, haha.
  - x86ARMsRace 6y ago
    Well, HTML5 super computers are the future.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Well, the next regularly scheduled Apple ISA switch is expected to be finished no later than 2035...
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Why wait when you can bring back Jazelle for WebAssembly?

thought_alarm 6y ago

8 months later, Microsoft would release VBScript.

greenkey 6y ago
Which became dominant for a while, but cgi scripts on the server-side were also hot. Enter Perl and PhP server-side. Then there was JSP, ASP, and ColdFusion, all server-side. Rails! Also server-side. Then back to JS.
- toyg 6y ago
  Rails is like 10 years later tho... everything else you mentioned was already around by 2000.
  - greenkey 6y ago
    Rails 1 was released in 2004.

greenkey 6y ago

I wish Matz had been there with Rubyscript. JS wasn’t as powerful back then; it took over a decade for it to evolve enough where people would really use it for much other than client-side validation and neat UI tricks. In comparison, Ruby was a great language to use, and it would’ve grown more quickly.

dan-robertson 6y ago
I wish they’d just used scheme
- colordrops 6y ago
  Exactly - rubyscript would have been just as hated as javascript; something like scheme or some other well designed language would have been better.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    I think we would just have got more Java applets. The idea of a programming language accessible to everyone did contribute a lot to its success.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - greenkey 6y ago
    That’s kind of harsh. Ruby was a great language and especially great syntax. Except for some duplication of methods and early misspelling of one or two methods, it would’ve been much easier for people to learn and do cool things with that didn’t happen in JS until years later. Scheme’s not bad, but I think if you compare The uptake of both, Ruby did better? (Not counting Lisp.) It was a cool language though; a lot of problems that would’ve been avoided, if people could type all the braces in correctly... for Lisp at least.
toyg 6y ago
Ruby was first released on the same year. Python had been around for 4 years already. What could have been, eh...

Rochus 6y ago

Wow, 25 years. Feels like yesterday, but several technological revolutions happened in these years.

hu3 6y ago
A quarter of a century. It's kind of mind blowing to me that PHP is as old as JavaScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

newyorker2 6y ago

> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. >JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. JS has come a long way in 25 years :-)

ethbr0 6y ago
>> can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications ... has it? ;-) (Note: joke with deference to the huge pool of incredibly talented js developers! But there are still a lot of mind bogglingly terrible js devs too)
- lostcolony 6y ago
  I think that's something JS also shares with Java, no. A huge number of the people focusing in it are terrible devs.
  - snazz 6y ago
    It's popular and taught in schools, so I don't think this is really surprising.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      Yeah, was not saying it was surprising. JS is basically required for frontend dev, and the number of bootcamps means a lot of supply, much of which is low grade. Java is super common for large projects at large companies where bad devs can basically be unnoticed, so little wonder there's so many poor Java devs at all levels of experience.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    The relative trajectories of Java and JavaScript over the years are fascinating. Java became a language that you can toss a 100-developers onto a project for, and incrementally grind out something that has a mostly-consistent architecture. Aka the perfect IBM Services language. JavaScript became a language you can toss up a SPA in a day from boilerplate glueing together frameworks and only writing the use-specific bits. Aka the perfect web developer language. As other commenter said, bad developers are probably a consequence of demand > supply for any language.

mseepgood 6y ago

> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly I didn't know that server-side JS was a thing back then.

vesinisa 6y ago
It wasn't. They basically predicted Node.js 15 years before its inception. EDIT: Okay, server-side JS indeed long predates Node.js. See below.
- BigFatGuy 6y ago
  Netscape Enterprise Server executed server-side JavaScript ("SSJS") https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-5653-10/816-5653-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/816-5653-10/816-5653-10...
- peteri 6y ago
  It was also an option for IIS as well as vbscript in classic ASP pages.
- icedchai 6y ago
  It was. I developed sites using Netscape Livewire, the server side JS in Netscape Enterprise Server. It was probably closer to ASP and PHP scripting, mixing HTML, client-side JS, and server-side JS in the same file.
rbg246 6y ago
Think it was this (I am sure someone here will know better): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(JavaScript_engine) Albeit it was two years after the announcement.
- philo23 6y ago
  Yeah, I remember people talking about Rhino when node.js originally came out, saying things like it's been tried before and wouldn't catch on.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Aeolun 6y ago

Damn, I was 7 at the time. And by the time I was 17, and just starting to build websites, it still felt like Javascript was barely a baby.

k__ 6y ago
I was 10 when it came out and wrote my first line of JS with 18 or something. It already felt dated to me at that time.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  I was....older....when it came out and so wrote my first Javascript code around 96. Actually back then it felt like a breath of fresh air. A way to run logic in the browser that interacted with HTML. Nobody saw it as a replacement to Java applets, Flash, Shockwave (anyone remember that plugin and Macromedia Director?), etc but it did open the door to make basic web pages a little more dynamic. Some time before 2000 (though I forget which year precisely) I even submitted some Javascript to Planet Source Code (anyone remember that website?) that simulated a Windows 95 desktop; complete with interactive start menu and task bar. That submission was the highest rated for that month and was awarded some free software as a prize -- though I never claimed that prize in the end. It's true that the early days of Javascript was rather lacklustre (not helped with the the IE/Netscape wars) and thus few people took it seriously as something that could displace Java applets nor Flash. But it was still widely used as something to make traditional web design a little more flexible (eg Javascript refreshes). Part of my actually misses those days. Web design was simpler in some ways (it was predominantly backend generated* HTML with JS sprinkled about sparsely). Though I don't miss browser incompatibilities -- even basic things like displaying a table (not a grid of divs, a literal <table>) was fraught with different browsers rendering the table differently. * and in fairness, I was always more of a backend engineer rather than frontend designer anyway

Orthw2020 6y ago

What bothers me is that they actually never apologised. A simple statement of acknowledging the damage caused would do!

jp555 6y ago
Struggle sessions were still horrible Maoist actions back then, not the "progressive" thing some call for them to be today. :P
netdur 6y ago
For what? Imagine a world without Javascript? You have mini extension in browser to just auto refresh gmail
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Imagine a world without Javascript? What a dream.
  - Jean-Philipe 6y ago
    I'd be afraid flash would come back. Ah, those flashbacks...
    - grishka 6y ago
      Flash is better than JS to be honest. JS still hasn't caught up with ActionScript. The only bad part about Flash is that it's proprietary.
      - recursive 6y ago
        When flash was focused, my keyboard shortcuts didn't work. I hated it just for that.
        grishka 6y ago

lr4444lr 6y ago

... and still looks like it hasn't aged a day in some ways. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something...

hrafn 6y ago
Note that the above link cannot be opened by clicking on it, the site redirects away request with a HackerNews referrer. Can still be opened by copying-and-pasting.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
echeese 6y ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/BigInt https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
severak_cz 6y ago
opening via right click to private window works

fuoqi 6y ago

I wonder in how many billions of dollars future generations will apprise this mistake.

Reedx 6y ago
Enough billions to make up trillions.

overkill28 6y ago

I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated. > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. Was this level of integration ever achieved? Did Java applets actually have a JS API? Or is this just corporate double speak.

Azleur 6y ago
Marketing move. Same reason they shoehorned constructors into a prototype based language. Java was all the rage in '95.
Yaggo 6y ago
Not only the name, but also the C-like syntax was borrowed from Java because of marketing reasons, despite the semantics were inspired by quite different languages such as Scheme and Self. What a pity!
Tade0 6y ago
> Did Java applets actually have a JS API? It was possible to expose something: https://www.codejava.net/java-se/applet/liveconnect-the-api-for-communication-between-java-applet-and-javascript https://www.codejava.net/java-se/applet/liveconnect-the-api-...
bawolff 6y ago
Yes, there was an api. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/LiveConnect https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/LiveCon... That said, the nomenclature was pure marketng bs.
tbranyen 6y ago
Definitely, HTML has several tags to help work with external types. You can interface with java, vbscript, flash, pdf, etc. You could absolutely expose top level methods and invoke them in JS.

forinti 6y ago

Such a shame that they didn't pick Scheme.

BasDirks 6y ago

This is an important document, because it disproves the prevalent notion that Java and JavaScript have nothing to do with each other. JavaScript has come a long way, to where the shame of any self-respecting engineer has been reduced to a bearable minimum!

pluc 6y ago
I wouldn't say bare minimum, JS still is all stupid about types.
DonHopkins 6y ago
No, it actually proves the notion that Java and JavaScript having something to do with each other was just marketing bullshit.

Tade0 6y ago

I wrote my first actually-doing-something lines of code back in 2001 in JS, because unlike e.g. Pascal, JS (or actually JScirpt) would just run and not ask stupid questions about types or missing semicolons and required only a browser. 12-year-old me was very happy with such a low barrier to entry language, especially given that I didn't have an internet connection until years later, so I had to learn mostly via trial and error.

optimalsolver 6y ago

It doesn't have to be this way. Hopefully Brython[0] which lets you do client-side Python scripting takes off. Imagine doing full stack web dev without seeing a single line of JS. [0] https://brython.info/ https://brython.info/

jfoster 6y ago
I love the idea. From experience, though, this type of thing becomes a bit painful when you realise that you actually want to use some of the tools & code from the javascript world.
The_Colonel 6y ago
That's just replacing one passable scripting language with another passable scripting language, just with worse performance. I don't see the point.
niek_pas 6y ago
Brython has been around for _years_ now and AFAIK has not shown any signs of taking off. I think you're better off placing your bets on newer ECMAscript features and full-conversion libraries like React.
bdcravens 6y ago
I think building apps in Rails/Opal is just as likely. Seriously though, I'm putting a lot of hope in the LiveView/Stimulus Reflex/etc approach.
speedgoose 6y ago
I very much prefer modern JavaScript compared to Python. It's faster, has a better async support, as powerful, and I don't have to care about white space.

brightball 6y ago

It’s funny seeing this. Yesterday I had to demo my 20 year old built in desk and found a Netscape Navigator CD inside.

bangtoyib 6y ago

nice

sturza 6y ago

We have to go back Marty!

toyg 6y ago
"Hey you, take your damn javascript off her..."

blablabla123 6y ago

> complementary to and integrated with Java That didn't go so well. It's well integrated with Webkit at least ;)

doublerabbit 6y ago

It's a shame too that TCL wasn't chosen to be the script of choice.

DonHopkins 6y ago
There was a whole war about that, in which Sun originally supported TCL (having hired John Ousterhout), that was started by RMS firing the first shot ("Why you should not use TCL"), but which TCL eventually lost. The Tcl War (1994) (vanderburg.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ Why you should not use Tcl. Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:14:52 -0400 https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html John Ousterhout's classy reply: https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html Personally, I was on the side of ScriptX at the time (essentially object oriented scheme with a more traditional syntax and a nice multimedia class library including QuickTime), but it wasn't mature or open enough at the time, and we lost too: ScriptX and the World Wide Web. "Link Globally, Interact Locally". By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX The real tragedy is that the script of choice for the web was't Lua: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12027092 by DonHopkins on July 3, 2016 [–] Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API." http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

victor106 6y ago

> today announced JavaScript, an open, cross-platform object scripting language Those words “open source” and “cross platform” are still in vogue today. That’s just amazing for an industry that changes every year and in the land of JS every month.

joe_momma 6y ago

Google where is your doodle honoring 25 years of javascript

siggi_pop 6y ago

That's funny cause I announced a poo in pot that day.

bisRepetita 6y ago

>Oracle Corporation Mark Benioff: (415) 506-7000

desmap 6y ago

OT: I recently learned C++ after doing JS/TS for years. This was an eye-opener because there were so many similarities which JS inherited from C/C++. Plus stuff I've seen in other languages and environments. After this, I thought that everybody should learn C/C++ at school, it's like Latin to other languages (I learned Turbo Pascal at school and didn't like how it handled pointers and its overall elaborative style).

vips7L 6y ago
C/C++ isn't a language! They're completely separate.
- desmap 6y ago
  I know this very well, still both have similarities to JS and eventually, C++ evolved from C. No need to be snarky.

atum47 6y ago

I bought a book, when I was about 12-15 years old, called DHTML (Dynamic HTML). It blew my mind to see things moving across the screen with just code. Keep in mind that I learned pure html when I was 10, my websites were all very static (apart from a animated GIF here and there). The only way you could do a cool menu, effect or animation, was with Java Applet (which I learned after purchasing a online Java course that was taught over ICQ - it doesn't get more 90's than that). I have this love relationship with javascript ever since I wrote my first "alert('hello')" and I wish it a happy birthday with many more years to come.

bdickason 6y ago
I remember this book! I think it was red with a yellow font maybe? Agree with you on the alert(‘hello’) :)
- atum47 6y ago
  Turns out I still have my copy[1]. I remember this guy[2] blowing my mind. He would move his arms to a menu, where your mouse hover. This whole book was a thrill for me. 1 - https://imgur.com/a/qMsw11C https://imgur.com/a/qMsw11C 2 - https://imgur.com/a/kZKyhok https://imgur.com/a/kZKyhok
arendtio 6y ago
It still bothers me when people talk about dynamic HTML these days. Just two weeks ago some team lead said it and I thought 'dude, that is so 90s'.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  It's also probably incorrect; DHTML didn't involve loading data via AJAX after the page loaded, but instead configuring the webpage on the client side after loading it. That said, ask them if they'd prefer the backend in PHP or Coldfusion.
  - MentallyRetired 6y ago

lioeters 6y ago

Related - A project posted earlier today: Mocha1995 - The world's first JavaScript engine written in 1995 by Brendan Eich, now compiled back to JS and WASM https://github.com/doodlewind/mocha1995/blob/main/blog/about.md https://github.com/doodlewind/mocha1995/blob/main/blog/about... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300698

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I remember this, when the HTML chats didn't need to be manually refreshed anymore... I still test with Netscape 2.0 out of respect, and some JS features work with it on my site. The Web is just amazing, I can write across 25 years of platforms from a dozen different vendors, totally unrelated, and it works in all of them!

tomhoward 6y ago

I didn't realise JS only appeared in late '95. I first used the web in early-mid '95; it must've been around April-May of that year. I'm no JS-hater, but it's still nice to think I had a brief few months of script-free web use before the JS era dawned.

nonesuchluck 6y ago

Not being on the web until the late 90s, the part I've never figured out is, what could you actually _do_ with JavaScript in the initial versions? The way I understand it, early JavaScript could only address HTML forms, links, and images. Can't modify HTML tags. Can't insert new elements. Can't update the page and re-render until DHTML in the version 4 browsers. Can't query the network until XHR. Ok, so now what? Do you just pop up an alert() when someone types 4 digits for a Zip code instead of 5? Image rollovers? Is that it?

petercooper 6y ago
Check out the JavaScript newsgroup from 1996 to see what people were discussing and trying to achieve :-) https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.javascript/search?q=after%3A1994-12-08%20before%3A1996-12-11 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.javascript/search?q=af...
cygx 6y ago
You could output HTML via document.write().
gmac 6y ago
As I recall you could do what felt like quite a lot by abusing image swapping and frames + document.write.
commandlinefan 6y ago
One of the big things back then was form validation. Web pages in the late 90's were necessarily very form driven (no AJAX back then), and users were frustrated to submit a form, wait for a response, only to be told that they were missing a required input (or as you suggest, 4 digits for zip code). So there were complex frameworks to let Javascript validate the form before it was submitted - the Struts framework would even generate the Javascript for you and keep it synchronized with the backend. But yeah, there wasn't really a whole lot of functionality. You could do fancier things with the Layer API in Netscape, but it only worked in Netscape.
- duxup 6y ago

thrower123 6y ago

What a disastrous day for the world.

cies 6y ago

Not my fav announcement. This funny (I think) video shows why: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat Disclaimer: I like types, I hate automatic casting.

th0ma5 6y ago
It is wild to revisit some of the inspiration of the kind of weaponized cynicism that hopefully we're getting away from. This talk was funny for sure, but it started a large amount of "computers are awful, look at what this stupid thing did" which was very harmful. Not because it isn't true, but because understanding why and how these things happen, dealing with and educated people surrounding these things, and trying to make things better is the goal (perhaps misplaced) of many in the industry. It is incredibly easy to just shit on things. Still a pretty funny talk for sure.
- cies 6y ago
  > educat[ing] people surrounding these things hmmm... i see more and more schools/unis teaching JS to beginners. it's beginning to be more of an elephant in the room than a poor kid that's bullies all the time. isn't calling this "weaponized cynicism" a way to silence dissent against the mainstream? JS clearly is mainstream now.
  - th0ma5 6y ago
    I think proper disagreement and criticism can be had communicating directly. Framing it as knowing "how it really is" or appealing to a supposed common knowledge of a criticism is an unfair and disingenuous form of communication.

sradman 6y ago

> JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. This one document certainly captures the state of the software industry before it was transformed by the Web (then Mobile then Cloud). The vision of JavaScript being both server-side and “isomorphic” is clearly articulated but it was a convoluted road getting there. Let’s credit Google’s V8 and Node.js for making performant and concurrent/evented JavaScript ubiquitous. Netscape/Sun, Microsoft, and Sybase abandoned their server-side JavaScript efforts for Java/.net bytecode. Microsoft was the only relevant browser until Firefox rose from the flames like a phoenix. Linux and OSS software killed or maimed most of the companies mentioned.

divan 6y ago

Such a sad day for an industry! In a slightly different turn of events, web software ecosystem perhaps could be different from the pile of hacks on top of hacks it is now.

bdcravens 6y ago
Java applets? Flash?
- divan 6y ago
  I'm thinking mostly on a scenario where browsers could have a competition of existing languages (C, C++, Java, Lua, etc).

ibraheemdev 6y ago

Hopefully a few years/decades from now, we will be remembering the day WebAssembly was announced. [1] 1: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/150 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/150

DonHopkins 6y ago

I love how the company contacts at the end include so many phone numbers, only a few email addresses, and zero urls.

arendtio 6y ago

I wonder how many people rue that day (especially in the HN community) ;-)

lta 6y ago
I cannot express how much I rue this day.

rodolphoarruda 6y ago

Precisely the same time I used to think JS was a lighter version of the Java language.

shmerl 6y ago

They should have used the name LiveScript. Java in the name was a complete disaster.

coldtea 6y ago

No algebraic types. Less speed than Smalltalk. Lame.

edub 6y ago

it is interesting that the archive.org version of this press release has a semi-colon after AT&T; i can't remember if in 1995 we would write the code to be AT&T or if that came a bit later. perhaps the scraper thought it was an HTML entity starting with the & followed by the T and it added the semi-colon. or maybe it originally was posted in 1995 without the semi-colon and before it got indexed in 2002 by archive.org someone ran a regex style replacement on old static html files at netscape to "fix" html entities. it just doesn't seem likely that a static html file from 1995 would have had AT&T; in it, it seems more likely that it was transformed either by the scraper or some internal script run after it was originally posted. i found an old email version of the press release on Lunds University website that does not have the semi-colon. http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt and what looks like an archive of the 1995 version of the java website hosted at University of Oviedo: http://www6.uniovi.es/java-http/pr951204-03.html http://www6.uniovi.es/java-http/pr951204-03.html

hcs 6y ago
In the raw version of the archived page, found by adding "id_" after the URL[1], there is no semicolon. The link to netscape.com at the end is mysteriously missing still, "Additional information on Netscape Communications Corporation is available on the Internet at ," [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020606002913id_/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020606002913id_/http://wp.nets...
- ignoranceprior 6y ago
  Does this mean the Wayback Machine has a bug relating to how it handles HTML entities?
- edub 6y ago
  welp, I did not know that you could get the raw version. Thanks for the tip! It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312677

hokumguru 6y ago

Apparently this project was started the week that I was born, nice.

DonHopkins 6y ago

Reminds me of one of Microsoft's first Dynamic HTML demos: There were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site". When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site" button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before you could click it! Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site" button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse! Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)

sneak 6y ago
And thus the concept of the web permitting the site developers to actively make it harder or even impossible for the user to express their wishes was born. The first dark pattern on the web?

cicero 6y ago

I remember being very excited about this announcement. I had been learning about Java, but I only had an HP workstation, which ran HP-UX Unix at work, and a Macintosh at home. Neither of them had a Java implementation yet, but I could run Netscape Navigator with JavaScript. I gave an enthusiastic talk on JavaScript at the next meeting of our local Java Users Group. However, as I got to know the language better, my enthusiasm dwindled due to what I thought to be a strange type system. Also, I got access to Java implementations on HP-UX and Macintosh, so I never went back to JS. This has always limited my ability to do web front-ends, but now I'm looking to using Blazor for that.

jzer0cool 6y ago

My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others. When I think back IE browser was the top browser and there were all sorts of workarounds to get it html compliant (or rather IE compliant). Easy to learn html, but hard to get it working right. Then adding in javascript for the added dynamic flair. I wanted to learn javascript & I ended up learning first java not knowing the difference at the time. Fun times were also spent at Barnes & Nobles / Borders (bookstore in U.S.) - checking out technical books and eventually I toiled through learning VBScript / Windows IIS to extend out a simple ecommerce site and possibly paving my way into the technical field. Didn't Netscape also have email integration? I can't recall anymore as I went through multiple internet providers like Aol.

godot 6y ago
I find the fragmentation interesting. In the mid to late 90s when I was first on the internet, the "prominent search engines" ranked (given to me by my ISP and some other sites) was something like AltaVista, Yahoo, InfoSeek, with Webcrawler and Hotbot down at the bottom. I believe my ISP distributed IE (3 at the time) with whatever internet software cd they included, and it was my first and default browser. Later on I tried installing Netscape Navigator, but it felt slow and clumsy compared to IE3 at the time, so I never understood why anyone used it. It's quite interesting how our internet experiences were so different! What is the same between us however is I also learned coding practically by first starting to make HTML pages, and some Javascript, and that was also my way into the technical field (decade and a half of working as a software engineer now). Like, sure, there were computer programming classes in school and every class used Pascal at the time (Quick or Turbo). It didn't feel like creating anything useful for the real world though; whereas with the web, I was immediately creating something for the world to see. I'd say learning to make web pages on my own was 99% of the reasons I became a software engineer later. The programming classes in high school, not so much.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Thunderbird debuted as Netscape mail and was combined in Netscape Communicator suite I believe. Memory fuzzy.

tacotacotacos 6y ago

Complements Java?!? I guess it also complements Erlang.

jfb 6y ago

A date that will live in infamy.

Zelphyr 6y ago

I was just thinking the other day about how in late '95 I had just bought my first PC and was teaching myself web development and discovered JavaScript. I remember submitting bug reports to Sun. I hadn't realized until the other day, after calculating the timeline, just how new JavaScript really was at that point in time.

Zelphyr 6y ago
Correction: Submitting bug reports to Netscape.

annadane 6y ago

This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move

jamesdhutton 6y ago

Interesting to read the list of companies in the announcement, and to contemplate that JavaScript has outlived most of them.

brundolf 6y ago

What stands out to me is how much more foresight they had than I'd thought about the ways JS would be used: > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. We tend to think of JS as having started out as just a way to dynamically show/hide elements, maybe add an animation or two, on top of fundamentally HTML-based web pages. But I see here described what we now think of as "web apps", and even web servers (!) written in JS. They even talk about code-sharing on the front and back ends, a la React in hybrid-mode. I had no idea those things were in people's minds at its inception. Edit: Apparently they already ran JS on the server! I had no idea > Netscape LiveWire enables JavaScript programs to be installed, run and managed on Netscape servers

drblast 6y ago
The industry is cyclical and to be forward thinking all you have to do is describe what's already happened and assume it will happen again. ;-) The things being done with JavaScript today are not new, nor is the idea that a server and client would coordinate to run interactive apps. That fundamental concept has been reimplemented in many different ways until we've landed on the current rube goldbergian monstrosity that are web apps. It shows that the desire to have users interact with a service in particular ways will not go away. The technology used to do that is mostly irrelevant.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I'm not surprised that the architecture isn't new, I'm surprised that web apps were already being talked about this way using JS specifically. JS's early design flaws are often written off as, "well it was never intended to be a real programming language like it is today". But from reading this, that doesn't sound to be the case.

supernova87a 6y ago

I'm glad they added all the individual contact information at the bottom -- I'm going call up Mark Benioff at Oracle (415) 506-7000 to ask him how to download the source!

kkotak 6y ago
Yep, before the Paypal mafia, there was the Oracle mafia :)
- xtracto 6y ago
  I think technology-wise, the Sun mafia were the cool kids. Or the Silicon Graphic mafia and even Microsoft. I was born in 1981, and the "cool" technology places to be when I was growing up were Microsoft, Sun and SiliconGraphics.
mattl 6y ago
That's just the main Oracle number I'm sure
- supernova87a 6y ago
  I'm not sure, but I think he's no longer at Oracle.
  - mattl 6y ago
    Probably not

aproductguy 6y ago

I legit miss Sun. Worked there for two years in 2002/03, and the level of talent there was astounding.

samstave 6y ago

in 1997 Iworked at the first firm that adopted XML Was on a conf call with VPs from Sun, and i said, and I quote myself: "So youre telling me that you have this shitty b2b system that youre not happy with and you want us to implement XML to accomodate" and this VP was nixing it the whole time iwth "hand cut across the neck" manurisms... later I hired Dave Sifry - and had his team implement a b2b FTP between us and sun... I later went to him and stated " You should really make a linux support company" Linuxcare was founded, worth unicorn. I got nothing

spamizbad 6y ago

Anyone know what ever came of this?

didip 6y ago

Javascript was such a misopportunity to use Scheme instead. All three HTML, JS, and CSS could have used one Lisp-like dialect. Also, I remembered that JS was horribly misunderstood for a long time because people weren’t used to the prototypical inheritance. And this is where jQuery comes in and took JS to the next level.

krapp 6y ago
>All three HTML, JS, and CSS could have used one Lisp-like dialect. Other than being aesthetically pleasing to a demographic of programmers, what would be the benefit? Modern sites already have a problem with JS being used to generate CSS and HTML, and separation of concerns being completely abandoned, and that's just created a mess where three separate, more explicit languages were simpler.
Wilem82 6y ago
Lol god forbid. Browser side programming is shitty enough without lisp nonsense.

evan_ 6y ago

In the beginning JavaScript was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

colejohnson66 6y ago
> widely regarded as a bad move. By who? You? Because there’s tens (hundreds) of thousands of programmers and thousands of companies working on JavaScript. Just because many here consider JavaScript bad doesn’t mean everyone does. JavaScript has many problems, but it’s not “widely regarded” as bad.
- Arnavion 6y ago
  (It's a quote from a popular book.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- abruzzi 6y ago
  the OP is referencing a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    I’m an idiot. I should’ve picked that out...
- evan_ 6y ago
  I love JavaScript, I spend 40 hours a week elbow-deep in the stuff, I'm just having some fun.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
Thou art in a simulation and it is written in JavaScript

xtanx 6y ago

FYI the internet archive is currently having a 2-to-1 matching campaign. https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/

cphoover 6y ago

This made me laugh... Like Java and Visual Basic a compliment to your applet

phendrenad2 6y ago

Here's hoping we can switch to webassembly before JS turns 30! We just need DOM manipulation. Come on Mozilla, I believe in you.

smithza 6y ago

It is fun considering I was not yet born yet when this came out. Most all of the SW languages I use are older than I am... python, C++, Java, JS, perl, elisp.

Snelius 6y ago

It was a sad day for the whole industry but nobody knew that yet.

anthk 6y ago

People forget one thing: instead of JS, TCL could've been the scripting language of the web.

HeavyStorm 6y ago

Wait, Sun? :o

viksit 6y ago

Did no one see Marc Benioff from Oracle listed as the original point of contact for the consortium of sponsors? :)) (and some others that went on to become industry stalwarts).

blackrock 6y ago

JavaScript is such a crappy programming language, that its only saving grace, is that people keep building other programming languages that transpiles down to it. So now, you have a poor language, with another layer of a different programming language. Is it any surprise that the web is so slow these days, with all these indirections?

stevefan1999 6y ago

"Ah, shit, here we go again"

cutler 6y ago

This seems to contradict the common assertion that Javascript and Java are unrelated. Interesting.

machinesbuddy 6y ago

As a complement to Java!?