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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