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Those of us old enough to remember (Brendan, that should include you) know that Javascript itself was developed by a company (Netscape) in pretty much exactly t

Those of us old enough to remember (Brendan, that should include you) know that Javascript itself was developed by a company (Netscape) in pretty much exactly the same way, for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Get off your high horse...

BrendanEich 15y ago
If you are that old, you really ought to have better reading comprehension. My argument has nothing to do with Netscape, me, or my high horse. Look, Netscape had a monopoly and put JS "on first" and just about everywhere. I'm done apologizing for that, I've made up for it in spades on standards work, and it's a fact I cannot recall and rewrite. The precise point now, here on planet earth and not wherever you are, is that Google is not that new monopoly. Not yet, not likely for years even in their wildest dreams. If Google were the monopoly Netscape was, sure: Dart would be the new JS. The two would co-exist for a long while but "replacement" would be conceivable so long as market power held up. Since Google does not have monopoly power, and with the non-standardizing tactics of that leaked memo, Dart is unlikely to be adopted by other browsers. It's fragmenting. It's an invitation to others to inject their own would-be replacements and build a Tower of Babel. Do you get my objection now?
- floppybunny 15y ago
  My point isn't that you should apologize -- why should you? Any more than Sun should apologize for Java, or Microsoft for .NET Sometimes shit needs to get done, and people need to make things happen. Google is trying to fix some problems; no big deal. You see "Tower of Babel", I see the free market offering alternatives. And don't be so quick to dismiss the likelihood of other browsers adopting Dart... If I'm not mistaken, IE supports Javascript, right? Let's argue languages based on technical merits, not how or by whom they were developed.
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    Your point was, and I quote: "Javascript itself was developed by a company (Netscape) in pretty much exactly the same way, for pretty much exactly the same reasons." That's wrong on at least two counts: 1. ["same way"] Netscape had a monopoly, it wasn't injecting JS into a situation where there was already a scripting language widely used on the web and implemented among multiple competing browsers. It was not fragmenting a multi-lateral browser market or web content language ecosystem. 2. ["same reasons"] The Dart reasons adduced in the leaked memo are nothing like our reasons at Netscape for doing JS. We (marca and I, mostly) wanted a language for non-Java programmers, non-programmers even, which could be written directly in HTML. A language designers, beginners, amateurs could learn by the yard. We did that without failing to upgrade a prior such language already widely supported. Dart, according to the leaked memo, aims to replace JS because JS can't be fixed. But who says JS can't be fixed? Why, the people making Dart, working at the dominant web company of the last decade! That's no "reason", it is a choice. "I see the free market offering alternatives." Uh huh. If Dart has native support only in Chrome, then it's not an alternative for people using other browsers. Then what? The "free market" is a bogus political phrase. I'm in favor of markets: real ones that self-regulate by preventing fraud (a central clearing/blinding counter-party, bid/offer/open-interest/size transparency) and abuse of power (market winners capture governments -- this has happened throughout history, it's a big problem right now, see the Global Financial Crisis). Talking about Google's anti-standards power games in the current multi-lateral browser market as if it's all "free market" goodness is b.s. "If I'm not mistaken, IE supports Javascript, right?" Think, floppybunny, think! IE supports JS because Netscape had a monopoly once it took over from Mosaic and grew the web via commercialization (SSL, another Netscape innovation). IE had no choice but to support "JScript", and indeed they were thus motivated to help standardize ES1. Standards, hmm. Google has no such monopoly. The likely outcome of putting a native Dart VM into Chrome and (again per the leaked memo) using Dart for web app development in Google is not to make other browsers roll over and embed the native Dart VM as well. Can you see Apple doing that? Microsoft? Mozilla would be expected to do it by all you bring-on-the-new-monopoly fanboys, but even if we did it wouldn't help. We're in a multi-browser market. Competitors try (some harder than others, pace Alex Russell's latest blog post) to work together in standards bodies. This does not necessarily mean everything takes too long (Dart didn't take a month or a year -- it has been going longer than that, in secret). Open standards development does not mean design-by-committee, either. Multi-browser collaboration among Apple, Mozilla, and Opera was what created HTML5. Dart goes the wrong way and is likely to bounce off other browsers. It is therefore anti-open-web in my book. "The end justifies the means" slaves will say "but but but it'll eventually force things to get better". Maybe it will, but at high cost. More likely, it won't, and we'll have two problems (Dart and JS). "Let's argue languages based on technical merits, not how or by whom they were developed." Now that's just low. You know damn well that Google has kept Dart a secret, so none of us can assess its technical merit (maybe you work for Google and can?). Sure, when Dart is released, let's argue in a new thread. This thread is about the fragmenting, essentially two-faced politics of the leaked JS strategy memo, and whether and why that's bad for the web. If you want a new monopoly to sweep the web clean, bully for you. No such monopoly exists now, so realists will still have to work in standards bodies. Is Google really working in standards bodies? As Maciej Stachowiak points out in this thread and over on reddit, more and more of their extensions in Chrome are not being standardized, and apparently won't be proposed "later".
- munificent 15y ago
  "I'm done apologizing for that, I've made up for it in spades on standards work, and it's a fact I cannot recall and rewrite." Wouldn't it be fair then to at least give Google the chance to do that standards work with Dart after it's released before labeling the company anti-open? How early should a language be announced? It's certainly not cool to drop it on the world when it's done and baked , solicit zero feedback, and then demand the rest of the world implement it. But it's also not cool to toss out some vaporware spec with no implementation and no empirical evidence that the language is any good.
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    Look at what's actually happened, never mind the future: 1. Dart development (Dash, whatever, and there may be more, including CSS and HTML killers; not sure, rumors swirl) has been ongoing for approximately 2 years -- or more. It didn't start last November. 2. Google members of Ecma TC39 have been working on ES.next (some harder than others, I observe) without being able to show how Dart solves "unfixable" JS problems. Such demonstrations would help either: 2a. steer JS toward fixes if the "unfixable" assertion is false (as seems likely to me; little is unfixable on the web), or else: 2b. abandon doomed fix-the-unfixable attempts and instead work harder on other and fixable problems (e.g. being a better target language for Dart-to-JS compilation). 3. Delayed open-source means other browser vendors and volunteers have a high hill to climb to become committers/reviewers/co-owners, so Google controls the open source. This has happened many times. Competitors are unlikely to join, especially if the code is complex and has deep dependencies on other code (cf. NaCl/Pepper). BTW, WebKit is an example more than a counter-example. It was Apple-dominated even though early-mostly-open, and now Google has taxed Apple committers/reviewers and is gaining the upper hand. WebKit was early-open, a fork of KHTML at first, then set up as webkit.org in 2005 patterned after mozilla.org and in the aftermath of a recruit-half-the-Safari-team-to-fork-Firefox attempt by Flock. This history shows more open that closed, and earlier open at that, but mixed up with various intrigues and corporate control agendas. While the history is not a clean win for any point of view, WebKit is a "commons" of its own. Note how chromium.org has to hold the Google-only extensions that Apple et al. won't take. 4. Standardization of Dart could happen anywhere, but it would be perceived as anywhere from wasteful to hostile for Google to bypass Ecma TC39. Early opening of a draft spec or even just an open-source implementation again could have won friends and influenced people on TC39. Late opening goes the other way. What actually has happened, from what we already know: late-open.
- Andi 15y ago
  I explicitly support Brendan's arguments. Programming languages are a STANDARD to help people COMMUNICATE units of functionality. If we frequently invent new languages that just mainly give us a new "style" to do things (and of course some will do this better, and others will do that better), we get an unnecessary chaos of different codebases that will be incompatible to each other but yet do basically the same. (1) Language design implies even more responsibility in versioning and adaptation to new programming paradigms than API design. Let me again cite Atwood's Law: "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." (see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-web-programming.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-... ) It doesn't matter that much in which language a program is written, as long as the language level fits the level of your module / application and portabiliy (1) is high. I would even vote against a separate module type and other experiments that complicate JS sytax. But this is, of course, another discussion. What I like and heavily use is CoffeeScript. Thank you Brandon for keeping things in order!

BrendanEich 15y ago

If you are that old, you really ought to have better reading comprehension. My argument has nothing to do with Netscape, me, or my high horse. Look, Netscape had a monopoly and put JS "on first" and just about everywhere. I'm done apologizing for that, I've made up for it in spades on standards work, and it's a fact I cannot recall and rewrite. The precise point now, here on planet earth and not wherever you are, is that Google is not that new monopoly. Not yet, not likely for years even in their wildest dreams. If Google were the monopoly Netscape was, sure: Dart would be the new JS. The two would co-exist for a long while but "replacement" would be conceivable so long as market power held up. Since Google does not have monopoly power, and with the non-standardizing tactics of that leaked memo, Dart is unlikely to be adopted by other browsers. It's fragmenting. It's an invitation to others to inject their own would-be replacements and build a Tower of Babel. Do you get my objection now?

floppybunny 15y ago
My point isn't that you should apologize -- why should you? Any more than Sun should apologize for Java, or Microsoft for .NET Sometimes shit needs to get done, and people need to make things happen. Google is trying to fix some problems; no big deal. You see "Tower of Babel", I see the free market offering alternatives. And don't be so quick to dismiss the likelihood of other browsers adopting Dart... If I'm not mistaken, IE supports Javascript, right? Let's argue languages based on technical merits, not how or by whom they were developed.
- BrendanEich 15y ago
  Your point was, and I quote: "Javascript itself was developed by a company (Netscape) in pretty much exactly the same way, for pretty much exactly the same reasons." That's wrong on at least two counts: 1. ["same way"] Netscape had a monopoly, it wasn't injecting JS into a situation where there was already a scripting language widely used on the web and implemented among multiple competing browsers. It was not fragmenting a multi-lateral browser market or web content language ecosystem. 2. ["same reasons"] The Dart reasons adduced in the leaked memo are nothing like our reasons at Netscape for doing JS. We (marca and I, mostly) wanted a language for non-Java programmers, non-programmers even, which could be written directly in HTML. A language designers, beginners, amateurs could learn by the yard. We did that without failing to upgrade a prior such language already widely supported. Dart, according to the leaked memo, aims to replace JS because JS can't be fixed. But who says JS can't be fixed? Why, the people making Dart, working at the dominant web company of the last decade! That's no "reason", it is a choice. "I see the free market offering alternatives." Uh huh. If Dart has native support only in Chrome, then it's not an alternative for people using other browsers. Then what? The "free market" is a bogus political phrase. I'm in favor of markets: real ones that self-regulate by preventing fraud (a central clearing/blinding counter-party, bid/offer/open-interest/size transparency) and abuse of power (market winners capture governments -- this has happened throughout history, it's a big problem right now, see the Global Financial Crisis). Talking about Google's anti-standards power games in the current multi-lateral browser market as if it's all "free market" goodness is b.s. "If I'm not mistaken, IE supports Javascript, right?" Think, floppybunny, think! IE supports JS because Netscape had a monopoly once it took over from Mosaic and grew the web via commercialization (SSL, another Netscape innovation). IE had no choice but to support "JScript", and indeed they were thus motivated to help standardize ES1. Standards, hmm. Google has no such monopoly. The likely outcome of putting a native Dart VM into Chrome and (again per the leaked memo) using Dart for web app development in Google is not to make other browsers roll over and embed the native Dart VM as well. Can you see Apple doing that? Microsoft? Mozilla would be expected to do it by all you bring-on-the-new-monopoly fanboys, but even if we did it wouldn't help. We're in a multi-browser market. Competitors try (some harder than others, pace Alex Russell's latest blog post) to work together in standards bodies. This does not necessarily mean everything takes too long (Dart didn't take a month or a year -- it has been going longer than that, in secret). Open standards development does not mean design-by-committee, either. Multi-browser collaboration among Apple, Mozilla, and Opera was what created HTML5. Dart goes the wrong way and is likely to bounce off other browsers. It is therefore anti-open-web in my book. "The end justifies the means" slaves will say "but but but it'll eventually force things to get better". Maybe it will, but at high cost. More likely, it won't, and we'll have two problems (Dart and JS). "Let's argue languages based on technical merits, not how or by whom they were developed." Now that's just low. You know damn well that Google has kept Dart a secret, so none of us can assess its technical merit (maybe you work for Google and can?). Sure, when Dart is released, let's argue in a new thread. This thread is about the fragmenting, essentially two-faced politics of the leaked JS strategy memo, and whether and why that's bad for the web. If you want a new monopoly to sweep the web clean, bully for you. No such monopoly exists now, so realists will still have to work in standards bodies. Is Google really working in standards bodies? As Maciej Stachowiak points out in this thread and over on reddit, more and more of their extensions in Chrome are not being standardized, and apparently won't be proposed "later".
munificent 15y ago
"I'm done apologizing for that, I've made up for it in spades on standards work, and it's a fact I cannot recall and rewrite." Wouldn't it be fair then to at least give Google the chance to do that standards work with Dart after it's released before labeling the company anti-open? How early should a language be announced? It's certainly not cool to drop it on the world when it's done and baked , solicit zero feedback, and then demand the rest of the world implement it. But it's also not cool to toss out some vaporware spec with no implementation and no empirical evidence that the language is any good.
- BrendanEich 15y ago
  Look at what's actually happened, never mind the future: 1. Dart development (Dash, whatever, and there may be more, including CSS and HTML killers; not sure, rumors swirl) has been ongoing for approximately 2 years -- or more. It didn't start last November. 2. Google members of Ecma TC39 have been working on ES.next (some harder than others, I observe) without being able to show how Dart solves "unfixable" JS problems. Such demonstrations would help either: 2a. steer JS toward fixes if the "unfixable" assertion is false (as seems likely to me; little is unfixable on the web), or else: 2b. abandon doomed fix-the-unfixable attempts and instead work harder on other and fixable problems (e.g. being a better target language for Dart-to-JS compilation). 3. Delayed open-source means other browser vendors and volunteers have a high hill to climb to become committers/reviewers/co-owners, so Google controls the open source. This has happened many times. Competitors are unlikely to join, especially if the code is complex and has deep dependencies on other code (cf. NaCl/Pepper). BTW, WebKit is an example more than a counter-example. It was Apple-dominated even though early-mostly-open, and now Google has taxed Apple committers/reviewers and is gaining the upper hand. WebKit was early-open, a fork of KHTML at first, then set up as webkit.org in 2005 patterned after mozilla.org and in the aftermath of a recruit-half-the-Safari-team-to-fork-Firefox attempt by Flock. This history shows more open that closed, and earlier open at that, but mixed up with various intrigues and corporate control agendas. While the history is not a clean win for any point of view, WebKit is a "commons" of its own. Note how chromium.org has to hold the Google-only extensions that Apple et al. won't take. 4. Standardization of Dart could happen anywhere, but it would be perceived as anywhere from wasteful to hostile for Google to bypass Ecma TC39. Early opening of a draft spec or even just an open-source implementation again could have won friends and influenced people on TC39. Late opening goes the other way. What actually has happened, from what we already know: late-open.
Andi 15y ago
I explicitly support Brendan's arguments. Programming languages are a STANDARD to help people COMMUNICATE units of functionality. If we frequently invent new languages that just mainly give us a new "style" to do things (and of course some will do this better, and others will do that better), we get an unnecessary chaos of different codebases that will be incompatible to each other but yet do basically the same. (1) Language design implies even more responsibility in versioning and adaptation to new programming paradigms than API design. Let me again cite Atwood's Law: "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." (see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-web-programming.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-... ) It doesn't matter that much in which language a program is written, as long as the language level fits the level of your module / application and portabiliy (1) is high. I would even vote against a separate module type and other experiments that complicate JS sytax. But this is, of course, another discussion. What I like and heavily use is CoffeeScript. Thank you Brandon for keeping things in order!