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I wish I had made newlines more significant in JS back in those ten days in May, 1995. I wish Brendan was not as skilled a hacker as he was. It's an amazing ac

I wish I had made newlines more significant in JS back in those ten days in May, 1995. I wish Brendan was not as skilled a hacker as he was. It's an amazing achievement that he produced Javascript in such a short time. Unfortunately it ended up having the sorts of flaws that are inevitable with such a timeframe, yet it was "good enough" so that everyone decided it was easier to live with the flaws than break compatibility and fix them. If the initial version of Javscript had been worse, we might be using a much better version today.

moonboots 15y ago
If javascript were any worse, it may have been sidelined entirely before it had a chance to improve, and we would be using proprietary application stacks like iOS even more heavily for client side development.
- wickedchicken 15y ago
  > If javascript were any worse, it may have been sidelined entirely before it had a chance to improve And we should keep using it in 2012, 17 years later?
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    JS has improved a lot in 17 years. It's still incumbent, and with ES6 and further Harmony work, it is still improving (much of ES6 are in V8 and SpiderMonkey, or coming very soon). Good luck displacing JS. I mean that sincerely, especially if you work in the open. Dart had a rough start but even ignoring that, I don't think it will succeed. We'll see.
    - gruseom 15y ago
      This looks like a good place to fulfill a promise I made to report back if my hopes were dashed about Dart (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989686 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989686). They were dashed pretty quickly. I've seen nothing compelling enough to prefer Dart to a fixed-as-much-as-is-practical JS. Especially if such a JS becomes more suitable as a compilation target (better numerics and so on).