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30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript"
- andsoitis 11mo agoJavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. While Java is used by programmers to create new objects and applets, JavaScript is designed for use by HTML page authors and enterprise application developers to dynamically script the behavior of objects running on either the client or the server. JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. JavaScript's design represents the next generation of software designed specifically for the Internet
- dormento 11mo ago"Capital I" internet. Love this aesthetic.
- tosti 11mo agoIt still annoys me whenever the public internet known as the Internet is misspelled with a lower-case i.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoHmm. Trying to remember if places I've worked at talked about "The Intranet" or "the intranet." I guess you could use "Intranet" as a proper noun if you're talking about the one in use at your company but then "intranet" if you're talking about the concept of an internet inside your company's firewall that's not connected to the Internet.
- DonHopkins 11mo agoThere are millions of intranets but only one Internet, that's the whole point.
- cpeterso 11mo agoYep, we write "the Internet". When was the last time someone wrote "an internet"? :)
- lo_zamoyski 11mo agoMaybe some aliens out there have their own internet. But then is the internet just the sum of all intranets and thus in a way just the top-level intranet? data Intranet = Intranet [Intranet]
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoThree responses ago. But yes, capitalized "Internet" refers to the "Connected Internet," of which there is only one. The first rule of SIPRnet is no one talks about SIPRnet. But if we did talk about it, the comment would likely be that it is like "the Internet" but not "the Internet." If you spend time in academia or academia-adjacent industrial research, you sometimes hear "an internet" (always with lower case to signal it's a common noun) to describe a network of networks. But you are right... that use is not growing and if anything shrinking.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoRight, but there are scads of "internets" (with the lower-case 'i'), which is exactly the point.
- halper 11mo agoIt is a proper noun, in contrast to the other internets. If there is a guy called Guy you would not call him guy.
- Mountain_Skies 11mo agoThey were practically daring Microsoft to create VBScript, which it did.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoAnd later it created JScript. Embrace and extend... this is the way.
- DoctorOW 11mo ago“This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
- udev4096 11mo ago"30 years ago today netscape and sun killed the web"
- le-mark 11mo agoIt’s really hard to understand today the level of hype around Java and OOP in the 90s. The fact Netscape changed the name from Livescript to JavaScript may be an indicator. This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
- jacquesm 11mo ago> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era. That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money. But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
- adventured 11mo agoSun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoCan confirm. The dot-com era startups I was involved with all had Oracle DB on Sun hardware. Apache was common. Java was somewhat common if you could deal with its slowness. C++ was common if you could deal with memory problems or needed more speed / efficiency than Java. The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting. I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
- dust42 11mo agoNetscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a standard in a wide variety of products. The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use. At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...
- znpy 11mo agoAnother testament to how incredibly forward looking Sun Microsystems was. Truly a champion of open systems.
- BirAdam 11mo agoIf I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
- dust42 11mo agoA big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
- mavhc 11mo agoTeenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
- intrasight 11mo agoSeems like just yesterday. It's also about when my daughter was born which also seems like yesterday. I was doing a whole lot of Netscape plug-in development around then. And traveled to Netscape's and Sun's offices in CA several times. Exciting era it was.
- hi41 11mo agoNice anecdote. What are you doing now? Are you a developer still or the VP of a company?
- intrasight 11mo agoStill coding and learning - which is my passion
- hoherd 11mo ago> Sun's offices in CA So basically everywhere in Santa Clara County and more.
- lenerdenator 11mo agoWould've been nice if they'd also released a decent standard library at the same time.
- vessenes 11mo agoQuick note that JavaScript was written in ten days by Brendan Eich. Ken Thompson built Unix over a 30 day period. Youth - go forth and build us something cool! It might work out.
- emorning4 11mo agoYou can tell
- vessenes 11mo agoFor sure. And, to quote the Systems Bible: Any complex working system is only the result of the growth of a simple working system. It works. It worked then, and it works now. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. Replacing it is likely impossible.
- dugmartin 11mo agoRemember the old Bjarne Stroustrup quote: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
- hoherd 11mo agoExactly. https://live.staticflickr.com/4066/4704268314_78149c3afc_k.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/4066/4704268314_78149c3afc_k.j...
- BrendanEich 11mo agoOne book covers the DOM and browser APIs, one does not.
- majorchord 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich > He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.
- ranger_danger 11mo agoI thought JavaScript was originally called LiteScript?
- masswerk 11mo ago"LiveScript" – all the proprietary Netscape technologies were named "Live…", as in LiveWire, LiveBridge, etc.
- mfro 11mo agoThe little quote from DEC led me to do some reading... crazy to think there were DEC manufactured(in the U.S. !) processors that could, in 1995, run JavaScript, Linux, BSD, Windows 2000, and Plan 9.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoYou're talking about MIPS?
- mfro 11mo agoDEC Alpha processors.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoI know. I was trying to be snarky. I still have an AlphaServer that I boot up from time to time to relive the glory days. Alphas were too good to be allowed to continue. I understand that intel won in the marketplace and DEC did some pretty stupid things, but I would be happier if they won with products that weren't so crappy.
- TMWNN 11mo agoAs mfro said, Alpha. DEC never manufactured MIPS processors; it bought them from (amazingly enough) MIPS Inc, and used them from 1989 in DECstation RISC boxes. DEC launched its own RISC architecture, Alpha, in 1992. I'm pretty sure DECstation was discontinued by 1995. DEC never did deliver OSF/1, its next-generation Unix, to DECstation despite promising to do so.
- mghackerlady 11mo agoAnd with that, the internet started to die
- masswerk 11mo agoIt's kind of funny to see how the endorsements were talking about rich multimedia integration, when your output options with JavaScript 1.0 were: writing into a textarea, writing into a form input field, or setting the state of other form elements (like checkboxes or select elements) – that's your rich multimedia experience! Of course, there was the infamous `document.write()`, when the document was loading and the document stream was still open, but this was more of a hack than an interaction model.
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoI think they were talking about using JavaScript to setup message queues between Java Applets and the Applets would be doing multi-media-esque things.
- masswerk 11mo agoSome seems to be server-side (LiveWire), as well, which was a Netscape product long before Node.js, but I'm not sure if this was already available, then. (When was the Netscape Enterprise server launched?) I'm also not too sure, if LiveConnect (the connection between JS and Java applets and vice versa) was already a thing, when JavaScript was announced. (I think, this came a little later.) Edit: I've a Netscape JavaScript book from when this was still in beta. (My first reading on the subject.) It does mention applets on a single page and that you may address them per ID via LiveConnect in a single sentence. So this was already implemented, but it wasn't advertised prominently. The book is all about form based examples. (The applications in this book were the same that were demoed as showcase applications by Netscape on their website – and probably represent a significant part of what these voices reacted to.)
- OhMeadhbh 11mo agoMy memory is that around '98 people were falling over themselves to figure out how to wire up "components" made of applets. I think that stopped being a thing when people figured out SpyGlass/IE didn't use the same techniques to wire applets as Netscape. So props to you Microsoft, you made my life irritating for multiple decades (don't get me started about 1990 when I was a beta tester for Microsoft C 5.0.) I remember using Netscape Enterprise Server suite, but didn't realize it had a JS engine in it. I do remember Rhino from a little later (though the wikipedia says it emerged in the late 90s.) And I have relatively horrible memories of the Netscape guys integrating the Visigenic ORB in both the enterprise server and Navigator. I wonder if Rhino was what they stuffed into NES/iPlanet/Sun ONE.
- neilv 11mo ago> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. Lies at the time. More accessible popular examples of extension languages already existed at the time (e.g., VB, Python, Tcl, various 4GLs, even COBOL), and none of them looked like this. They gave it the syntax to look much like a systems programming language, and a semantics that wasn't all that great for this purpose. (Syntax inherited from Java, which was actually a very nice applications language at the time, but had to replace the C++ that embedded developers would have otherwise used for set-top-like boxes that Sun was targeting at one point for Oak (Java). And, hey, random non-programmers can totally pick up a semantics that's a mix of functional and block-structured imperative, with a prototype-delegation object model that almost no one has seen before, and lot of error-prone pitfalls.) This is what happens when marketing, product management, and engineering aren't working together, or are thrown together much later in the timeline than you'd prefer. > Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. But first, press release! Because we've assembled an industry gang of endorsements, to plow right over the W3C on a central Web standard, with this hasty kludge that one programmer whipped out from bad requirements and rush constraints, in literally a few weeks, knowing at the time it was a poor approach and he would've done better with even a little more time or better requirements. "We'll deal with the tech debt later." We know how that played out for the industry. Now we have an entire field that is incapable of building a reasonably secure system for anything involving the Web. (Security isn't the only effect; it's just a harder-to-ignore example of what happens when everyone has to poke at big shoddy messes to do anything, and no one sufficiently understands what they're doing.) And it didn't even selfishly benefit Netscape or Sun for very long. Maybe some people got their bonuses and promotions that year, but both companies were soon ruined, after some great earlier engineering and product work.
- empath75 11mo agoThis is such a weirdly antagonistic take. Javascript was out there first, and it was good enough, and a vast improvement over both flash and java in the browser. There's no guarantee that some committee designed language would have ever made it out to the public, let alone that it ever would have gotten any kind of uptake, or that it would have been better than javascript.
- simonw 11mo agoLove the optimism of this bit: > JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications
- Insanity 11mo agoI read this as a negative. As in, as soon as someone without experience touches JavaScript, everything becomes complex quickly. Which is probably somewhat true now in the GenAI + over-engineered framework age.
- anthk 11mo agoSome VB applications were very nice design wise, and ditto with TCL/Tk. They were it a bit loated for its era (Pentium I-III), but I've seen worse JS aberrations.
- vivzkestrel 11mo agoanyone got a time machine? lets go back in time and change their specification to typescript
- DonHopkins 11mo ago"Don't trust anyone over 30." -Jack Weinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg
- derekcheng08 11mo agoThat was an insane time. The pace was unreal. I remember Netscape 2.0 had at least 6-7 beta releases prior to the full release. And each one just dropped something massive and fundamental to the Internet - JavaScript (then called LiveScript IIRC) being one of those things. Just casually dropping what would dominate the entire industry in a browser beta. The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
- pookha 11mo agoLOL. And Netscape 1.1 just casually birthed SSL (2.0) for the world and future generations.
- tingletech 11mo agoRight around this time I got to go to the bookstore at UCSD and buy a Sun desktop machine. I also bought a shrink-wrapped compiler, a shrink-wrapped Sybase, and a shrink-wrapped Netscape Enterprise Server. I built a lot of server side javascript web apps in Netscape enterprise server, and a built a windows shell in javascript with netscape (I had to get a code signing certificate to remove the chrome in Netscape). Over 300 public workstations in the libraries ended up running that funky javascript shell (replacing all the green and amber screen terminals). Writing the server side apps and hacking together that shell is basically what taught me programming. That plus I had to migrate a bunch of perl 4 code to perl 5.
- vondur 11mo agoHow much was the student discount back then? I vaguely remember SGI coming to my University and having a complete system for like $2000 back in the day (1996 or 1997). IIRC a Pentium Pro based system would have been similarly priced.
- zombiwoof 11mo ago[dead]
- aanet 11mo agoIf any language needs to rest in peace, it might be JS It's time has come... /s (my 2c, an ex-JS guy. Sometimes I still wrangle with it)
- cramcgrab 11mo agoIt was actually created in around 10 days by Brendan Elch at Netscape, originally called Mocha.
- t1234s 11mo agoalert('Yay!');
- leptons 11mo agoAbout 2 years before Javascript existed I was very much into the web, first using the Lynx browser, and later Mosaic on an Amiga. I had also been doing a lot of AREXX script programming on the Amiga at the time. I remember telling a friend "This web browser thing really needs a scripting language", like I wished AREXX (or some language) could automate the web browser. When Javascript first came out in Netscape, my prayers were answered, and there was no looking back. I've been coding Javascript every day since it was released in Netscape.
- drewlesueur 11mo agoWritten by AI? "AT&T;'s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology -- it is support for an open standards process."