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This was from 2002, when most JavaScript was authored and consumed as "JavaScripts" - little opaque snippets you could download from places like dynamicdrive.co

This was from 2002, when most JavaScript was authored and consumed as "JavaScripts" - little opaque snippets you could download from places like dynamicdrive.com and paste into a script tag to add some kind of "dynamic" effect to a page (hide/show content on click, for example). It was almost universally thought of as a toy language that wasn't even as good as VBScript. It took David Flanagan's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts for people to begin taking it seriously. Prior to that, any serious client-side code was authored as a Java applet or in Flash.

grahamlee 4y ago
Indeed; and I was talking about the Javascript "object model" as it existed at the time, not the ES5 thing that adds classes back in after we failed to teach JS developers what "this" is. Those little dynamic effects were, after all, working almost exclusively with the Document Object Model.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  The object model hasn't changed -- ES5 classes are syntactic sugar on top of standard prototype-based JS classes :-)
  - cxr 4y ago
    The fact that you both refer to "ES5 classes", when in fact ES5 has no classes, is very relevant to the meta/epistemological aspects of this discussion and an indicator of whether or not some of the other remarks should be taken as authoritative truths.
    - TimTheTinker 4y ago
      My bad, I forgot when the class syntax was introduced. And yes, don't take my points as authoritative. Here's a more authoritative resource: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Classes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
    - grahamlee 4y ago
      sorry, on my keyboard 5 is right next to 6.
  - grahamlee 4y ago
    It's true that the implementation model didn't change, but the conceptual model did: the new "class" thing lets people express designs containing what they call "classes" with "methods" even though what they're building is constructor functions that return objects where some of the properties are occupied by functions. That kind of chicanery isn't unique to JS, by the way, which I mention because of the unfair malignment of JS in the original article. Smalltalk-80 syntactically has blocks, but the code in a block is just compiled into the surrounding method and the block invocation is a fancy GOTO statement.
cxr 4y ago
> It took David Flanagan's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts for people to begin taking it seriously. You're giving developer.mozilla.org (and the existence proof that is/was Firefox and other Mozilla toolkit applications) short shrift. The wider world began taking JS even more seriously when the iPhone launched with the imprimatur that Safari was its SDK (even if that detail was eventually reversed and largely forgotten). Also: thought of as a toy language, sure, but being considered one that "wasn't even as good as VBScript" is highly exaggerated.

grahamlee 4y ago

Indeed; and I was talking about the Javascript "object model" as it existed at the time, not the ES5 thing that adds classes back in after we failed to teach JS developers what "this" is. Those little dynamic effects were, after all, working almost exclusively with the Document Object Model.

TimTheTinker 4y ago
The object model hasn't changed -- ES5 classes are syntactic sugar on top of standard prototype-based JS classes :-)
- cxr 4y ago
  The fact that you both refer to "ES5 classes", when in fact ES5 has no classes, is very relevant to the meta/epistemological aspects of this discussion and an indicator of whether or not some of the other remarks should be taken as authoritative truths.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    My bad, I forgot when the class syntax was introduced. And yes, don't take my points as authoritative. Here's a more authoritative resource: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Classes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
  - grahamlee 4y ago
    sorry, on my keyboard 5 is right next to 6.
- grahamlee 4y ago
  It's true that the implementation model didn't change, but the conceptual model did: the new "class" thing lets people express designs containing what they call "classes" with "methods" even though what they're building is constructor functions that return objects where some of the properties are occupied by functions. That kind of chicanery isn't unique to JS, by the way, which I mention because of the unfair malignment of JS in the original article. Smalltalk-80 syntactically has blocks, but the code in a block is just compiled into the surrounding method and the block invocation is a fancy GOTO statement.

cxr 4y ago

> It took David Flanagan's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts for people to begin taking it seriously. You're giving developer.mozilla.org (and the existence proof that is/was Firefox and other Mozilla toolkit applications) short shrift. The wider world began taking JS even more seriously when the iPhone launched with the imprimatur that Safari was its SDK (even if that detail was eventually reversed and largely forgotten). Also: thought of as a toy language, sure, but being considered one that "wasn't even as good as VBScript" is highly exaggerated.