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Nah, if I were to go back in time I'd just push them to clean it up a bit before launch. In the end, JS has been a net good for the industry. I don't work in i

Nah, if I were to go back in time I'd just push them to clean it up a bit before launch. In the end, JS has been a net good for the industry. I don't work in it, but it's turned into something decent over the years though the frameworks around it are insane. But it took 15 years to get to this place and become a "grown up" tool, imho partially because of some odd choices early on. Scoping: Especially initially, the scoping rules were really wonky. OO: I am actually a fan of prototype inheritance (Self & LambdaMOO FTW) but the form implemented in JS was confusing for most people and they never understood it, esp given Java was ascendant at the time with its very strict and boring class-based model. I think some clarity was needed here. Lack of standardization around how to do objects, inheritance, encapsulation led to a total bizarre mixture of approaches and misunderstandings. Essentially I just think having it passed over by some more sober minded language designer types who had research background in e.g. Scheme, Lisp, Self, etc. would have been good. Going all in on JS instead of wasting time with the ill-fated Java applet stuff would have been good for the industry. It's what the industry ended up doing eventually anyways, but it took until the 2000s before this really clicked for people and they finally gave up on the various half-baked dynamic plugin solutions (Flash, ActiveX, Java applets, etc). The "Java" in the name was/is a problem and led to a decade of stupidity. I understand how it happened, but it shouldn't of.

cxr 3y ago
> Lack of standardization around how to do objects, inheritance, encapsulation led to a total bizarre mixture of approaches and misunderstandings. That void never really existed. There was the right way to do it, basically the same way that ES6's class syntax actually works today, and then there were a bunch of people fooling themselves into believing that the impedance mismatch that resulted from writing code against their own derpy metaprogramming system they'd devised themselves was acceptable. The attitudes associated with that mindset never really went away—it's what drives the demand for stuff like Webpack, along with NodeJS's CommonJS-inspired approach to modularization infecting everything and the README for create-react-app providing list of steps to get someone up and running requiring them to download half a gigabyte of packages to their disk before they can successfully complete the Hello, World exercise, not to mention the abstraction (and resulting boondoggle) that is React itself.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  If I put myself back there in the mid 90s, I actually don't think Netscape paid it (OO semantics & standards) much heed because the purpose of the language at the time really was just to add some minor scripting behaviour / actions to pages, not to build out applications. Actual "serious" uses of JS didn't really ramp up until the end of the decade, and by then people were doing what you're saying, yes. Netscape releasing a style guide with the language, and a set of standard libraries that used them, that would have helped. But everyone back then was too distracted with "Java is the Future of the Browser" (Narrator: It Wasn't)

cxr 3y ago

> Lack of standardization around how to do objects, inheritance, encapsulation led to a total bizarre mixture of approaches and misunderstandings. That void never really existed. There was the right way to do it, basically the same way that ES6's class syntax actually works today, and then there were a bunch of people fooling themselves into believing that the impedance mismatch that resulted from writing code against their own derpy metaprogramming system they'd devised themselves was acceptable. The attitudes associated with that mindset never really went away—it's what drives the demand for stuff like Webpack, along with NodeJS's CommonJS-inspired approach to modularization infecting everything and the README for create-react-app providing list of steps to get someone up and running requiring them to download half a gigabyte of packages to their disk before they can successfully complete the Hello, World exercise, not to mention the abstraction (and resulting boondoggle) that is React itself.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
If I put myself back there in the mid 90s, I actually don't think Netscape paid it (OO semantics & standards) much heed because the purpose of the language at the time really was just to add some minor scripting behaviour / actions to pages, not to build out applications. Actual "serious" uses of JS didn't really ramp up until the end of the decade, and by then people were doing what you're saying, yes. Netscape releasing a style guide with the language, and a set of standard libraries that used them, that would have helped. But everyone back then was too distracted with "Java is the Future of the Browser" (Narrator: It Wasn't)