3 ms·

Who was going to make it happen? Microsoft was so dominant, and no one wanted another language that MS owned coming down the pipe, and there wasn't really anyon

Who was going to make it happen? Microsoft was so dominant, and no one wanted another language that MS owned coming down the pipe, and there wasn't really anyone left to have the resources to push something else, even if they'd wanted to. These were the days when Microsoft was M$, and it might be hard to remember just how anti open source they were. There was just _no way_ M$ was going to support a new (or existing) open source language in IE unless they were forced. And none of the niches that loved those languages had any interest in working with M$ to "embrace and extend" their language of choice, so it's not like there was a lot of cooperation out there.

dcminter 5y ago
You forget that at the height of the browser wars Netscape was vying with Microsoft to add new features and they didn't particularly need to be compatible; remember Javascript wasn't (initially) available on Internet Explorer, it was Netscape only for at least a year or two. I wonder that Netscape didn't add a few more languages to the party as a fire and motion exercise against the competition. The moment "does it run on IE?" became uppermost in developers minds was (as I see it) the moment the original browser wars ended and the long cold war began. But there was a cambrian explosion of often-incompatible features before that. Edit: I definitely buy that as the reason that IE didn't adopt any other languages, though, and maybe there just wasn't time for Netscape to bolt another one on? Or maybe their great rewrite got in the way (I'm hazy about the timeline for that).
- sparker72678 5y ago
  Hm, yeah I wonder if there was really time/resources for Netscape to pull that off if they'd even wanted. There was so much going on with HTML/CSS/etc. simultaneously. And it definitely wasn't certain at the time that a scripting language, running in the browser, was going to be The Future.
- goto11 5y ago
  > I wonder that Netscape didn't add a few more languages to the party as a fire and motion exercise against the competition. Not a great strategy when your competitor have much more resources than you have yourself. Microsoft could quickly reverse-engineer any Netscape feature, and Netscape had limited resources. Any wasteful drain on Netscapes resources would just have played into Microsofts hands.

dcminter 5y ago

You forget that at the height of the browser wars Netscape was vying with Microsoft to add new features and they didn't particularly need to be compatible; remember Javascript wasn't (initially) available on Internet Explorer, it was Netscape only for at least a year or two. I wonder that Netscape didn't add a few more languages to the party as a fire and motion exercise against the competition. The moment "does it run on IE?" became uppermost in developers minds was (as I see it) the moment the original browser wars ended and the long cold war began. But there was a cambrian explosion of often-incompatible features before that. Edit: I definitely buy that as the reason that IE didn't adopt any other languages, though, and maybe there just wasn't time for Netscape to bolt another one on? Or maybe their great rewrite got in the way (I'm hazy about the timeline for that).

sparker72678 5y ago
Hm, yeah I wonder if there was really time/resources for Netscape to pull that off if they'd even wanted. There was so much going on with HTML/CSS/etc. simultaneously. And it definitely wasn't certain at the time that a scripting language, running in the browser, was going to be The Future.
goto11 5y ago
> I wonder that Netscape didn't add a few more languages to the party as a fire and motion exercise against the competition. Not a great strategy when your competitor have much more resources than you have yourself. Microsoft could quickly reverse-engineer any Netscape feature, and Netscape had limited resources. Any wasteful drain on Netscapes resources would just have played into Microsofts hands.