
What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017) - philnash
https://medium.com/dailyjs/heres-what-people-in-tech-had-to-say-about-javascript-when-it-debuted-in-1995-a4b81dc05b71
======
BiteCode_dev
I note that all those ecstatic quotes are from executives.

Because the way I remember it, technical people hated it with a passion, from
its design to its implementation.

In fact, the most popular JS projects have always been to avoid writing ES5,
its DOM API, or depending of one of its implementation:

\- scriptaculous: we hate even the basic types, so we monkey patch our own
code into it.

\- jquery: don't use any of the language paradigms and use ones from Lisp and
Haskell. Avoid "this". Don't touch the DOM. In fact, don't code, just make a
few calls and pass parameters. And we rewrite the whole damn browser API to
avoid incompatibilities.

\- GWT: write JS from Java.

\- underscore and co: let's rewrite typeof, the equality sign and array
manipulation methods. And provide an stdib for god sake.

\- coffeescript: we like Python and ruby but must do JS.

\- React: HTML in JS now please. And magic DOM. Oh, and prototyping is
horrible, lets use classes. And we strongly advice immutability, but do what
you please...

\- webpack and babel: ES6 and 7 are not here yet, but ES5 is so bad we will
setup an entire ecosystem dedicated to make believe they are. Also pretend
import works like in other languages.

\- typescript: ok, we were wrong, ES7 is not enough. Not nearly enough. Please
make intellisense works.

Now, in 2020, JS is finally not so horrible to work with. You can use map(),
() => and "..." and fake namespaces. Which is amazing to access the crazy cool
plateforms that the modern browsers and the web are.

So I guess, in a way, this quote from the AOL guy was true.

~~~
z3t4
JavaScript has a very high learning curve. But it becomes great once you are
fluent. When manipulating the DOM it kinda sucks that you can't just monkey-
path attributes, you have to use el.setAttribute. The DOM is also very slow.
But the DOM do a lot of work - ever tried to make your own UI framework from
scratch only using low level GUI calls? z-index, styling with CSS, screen-
reader support, etc.

~~~
austincheney
> The DOM is also very slow.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22391509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22391509)

> I still have people argue with me that the DOM is slow even though all the
> evidence and browser vendors claim updates to the DOM is simply switching a
> bit in memory. In other words many web developers have utterly no idea how
> their platform works.

I guess not much has changed in 25 years. Most developers still fear the
language, have no idea how it works, and will do everything in their power to
pretend this language is some other language.

> ever tried to make your own UI framework from scratch only using low level
> GUI calls? z-index, styling with CSS, screen-reader support, etc.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22321333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22321333)

~~~
z3t4
I meant creating a GUI from scratch. Creating a GUI using the DOM is easy.
Working with the DOM overall is simple. What I mean is that the DOM do so much
work for us (that we take for granted).

What I mean by slow is for example adding a element to the screen, or updating
some text. Compared to for example everything that happens on the screen in a
3d game.

I do everything using vanilla JS and I cannot understand why anyone would use
a web framework, (although most web project does). I do however have a vague
memory that the learning curve was fairly steep, as I have been working with
vanilla JS for over 20 years. (whereas the average developer has only used JS
for one year) it wasn't until I started to use JS full stack (with Node.JS)
that I started to like it!

~~~
piva00
I worked with vanilla JS for some time (before Prototype.js or jQuery existed)
and used a bunch of incantations of different libraries and frameworks over
the years and I cannot understand why anyone would choose to use JS for
platforms where you can use any other language (aka... any platform that isn't
a browser).

No construct or design decision of JS is better than in other languages, the
lack of a basic standard library hurts a lot. Dependency management was
inexistent until recently, the same for a lot of basic constructs, data types
and other utilities that should be baked into any modern language.

The current landscape of JS is so convoluted and with such a varying level of
quality that is intractable for me just trying to get things done without
getting into the community and everything around it, it's not an easy tool to
use and it's not an ergonomical one.

I have used JS for the past 15+ years for different kinds of software and I
dislike it, not intensely but I'd never choose to work solely on JS. Yes, you
can be productive in it but there are much better tools for most of the job it
does around, its only power was to be the only language you could use to
script a browser and I hope that WASM kills that.

~~~
austincheney
JavaScript has taught me that there are only two things separating a novice
programmer from an excellent programmer: writing and data structures.

In order to improve as a programmer over the years I have had to learn to
improve my writing. This requires a clear vision before putting keys on a
keyboard and a solid sense of organization. You should know what you are going
to work on with a strong confidence on how to go about it before doing any of
the actual work. Sure rough spots will emerge along the way, but that
shouldn't stop you from solving for the original vision. Then once the
original vision is achieve refactor, debug, and refactor again. In writing
that is call drafts and second opinions. This applies to any programming
language equally.

A confidence of data structures is also critically important. Once skills and
conceptual mental modeling of data structures becomes as common as spelling
your name algorithms and logic almost write themselves. JavaScript does some
things right by providing simplified data structures (objects, arrays, sets,
maps, and such) and is really expressive in how you use them. JavaScript also
does a lot wrong in this regard with its loose typing and some of its sloppy
conventions. Fortunately, TypeScript interfaces coupled with consistent use of
strict type declarations close many of those gaps.

\---

I have heard so much hope for WASM killing JavaScript over the last 3 years,
and almost all of it based on ignorance of how the technologies work. So much
of this hope hinges on the availability of the page's DOM to a WASM instance
by people who have never written to the DOM and have no idea what they are
really asking for. While the WASM working group says this will never happen I
suspect that very simple technology reasons will get in the way first
regardless of what anybody wants.

If, however, WASM does replace JavaScript because the page's DOM becomes
available to a WASM instance I suspect it will be the same clusterfuck that
those developers were hoping to replace. I suspect if those developers
couldn't figure out the relationship-oriented tree structure of the DOM using
JavaScript they fail all the same when using their favorite language.

I can understand replacing JavaScript for other reasons, but rarely (extremely
rarely) are the well grounded reasons ever a primary motivation for wanting
JavaScript replaced.

------
aazaa
The release of JavaScript was deeply confusing to me as a developer back then.
Java applets and Macromedia Flash were already touted by their vendors as the
one true way forward for interactivity. The scripting language released at
about the same time seemed like an oddball.

It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't
work well. It was extremely slow, limiting the complexity of what could be
built with it. There were problems galore with cross-browser compatibility of
what was written. There was no reliable vector graphics or canvas system, so
you really couldn't do much graphically. The DOM interface was hard to
understand to be charitable. It didn't run outside of the browser, so how dare
you call yourself a developer if you were using it?

To the extent that developers knew JavaScript existed at all, it was not
considered a programming language.

These things started to change in the early 2000. So deeply ingrained with the
disgust for JavaScript, that it took a very long time for the consensus to
emerge that you could actually build very complex software on a post-V8
runtime.

~~~
reflectiv
Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing
Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was
even possible.

After Gmail...things really started to move in the javascript world...people
started to put effort into both the runtimes and the libraries.

~~~
monocasa
And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java
down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.

~~~
svachalek
I think most of it was written for the Closure compiler (JS-to-JS), with some
bits like chat windows in GWT (Java-to-JS).

~~~
monocasa
I was under the impression that the closure compiler didn't exist in 2004,
only GWT, and that it was rewritten to be almost all JS later.

------
btilly
JavaScript is a fascinating example of Microsoft successfully getting a giant
own goal.

The promise of the web was cross platform applications that required no
installation. Microsoft's fear was that cross platform applications would make
the operating system irrelevant and reduce Windows lock-in. Both Sun (with
Java) and Netscape wanted Microsoft's worst fears to happen.

This was the era of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. So Microsoft embraced the web
and added a variety of extensions that only worked on Internet Explorer and
Windows. The browser wars followed, which Microsoft resoundingly won.

Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing
everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that
would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows.
One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft
applications using various Microsoft extensions.

One of those applications was Microsoft Outlook. Which needed to poll the
server and find out if there was new mail. For that purpose they wrote the
first version of the XmlHttpRequest object. This was in 1999 and they thought
nothing more of it...until gmail and then Google Maps came out in 2004 and
demonstrated what could be done with it.

The next thing you know, everyone is talking AJAX. Mozilla makes the web
accessible to the world. And then Google decided to throw serious energy into
a better JavaScript runtime (aka V8) because they wanted to be able to write
more sophisticated applications.

And the result is that Microsoft's nightmare has now been realized. But none
of it could have happened without that fateful decision to supply the missing
piece for a ton of applications of having an asynchronous way to go back for
more data without loading another web page.

~~~
majormajor
> Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing
> everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications
> that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on
> Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft
> applications using various Microsoft extensions.

IE ran on Mac but, in a super-fun fashion, wasn't exactly the same IE, IIRC.

There was a period, pre-Camino (Mozilla fork before Firebird/Firefox for Mac
got good), pre-Safari, where IE was the single best browser for Macs, yet
still wasn't as good as IE on PC...

~~~
normaljoe
Oh I remember those days and yes IE was the better browser even in the early
Safari days. Back in '03 I still had get a VirtualPC instance running for a
few websites and let that crawl.

The old MS/Apple relationship is kind of weird almost like the Gates/Jobs
relationship. For you young folks it may be hard to believe but Excel started
as a Mac App.

------
russellbeattie
I think that for consumer applications, JavaScript took a while to be really
useful - like someone else noted Gmail was the first serious JS app I can
think of. But for Intranets, it was pretty essential pretty quickly as web
apps took over from Lotus Notes, Access databases, a million dBase
applications and other proprietary front ends. And Microsoft was pushing it
(and VBScript) hard in Internet Explorer under the DHTML moniker.

In 1999 I worked on a contract for Levi's in SF and clearly remember using
JavaScript to pull data from a huge hierarchy of product styles and presenting
it to the end user as a widget where they could add/remove/move entries
around. I remember abusing the cookies API to save the latest client state
between page refreshes as it was the only real way to do that at the time.
Something like this would have been a total pain in the ass without logic in
the browser. In fact, I may have been replacing some sort of Java Applet or
ActiveX widget which did something similar in a slower, less flexible way.

So whether it was a huge success outside of corporations or not, I was using
it to make a living pretty much from day one.

~~~
johannes1234321
First proper JavaScript apps were Firefox/Netscape 9/Thunderbird where the
user interface was done in JavaScript+XUL, while not being loaded from a
server and most logic was done in C++.

------
jbob2000
Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from
high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

~~~
danmg
It was not well liked.

The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for
things like form validation.

Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error
during execution which happened frequently.

~~~
asveikau
Not only that, for years afterwards the techie crowd and equivalent of places
like HN (I suppose I am mostly talking about slashdot) had a lot of people
saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages
should fail gracefully to non-JS content, etc.

I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above
were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it
crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like
gmail in 2004 were a turning point.

~~~
LandR
>a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the
browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content,

I still feel like this.

~~~
asveikau
Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new
normal.

~~~
karatestomp
My love of a paycheck drives me to give deference to the new normal. Meanwhile
real desktop programs are still way more pleasant to use and way more
respectful of my system resources, and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly
nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

~~~
asveikau
> and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better
> performing than JS heavy ones.

I dunno, there are some pretty egregious examples of this being false though.
gmail is one such example. I remember using webmail in the days where every
action was a full page load -- and we had slower connections then too, which
made it hurt even more. Then gmail came out and blew everybody away with its
response times. A well thought out AJAX solution could give you minimal load
times for data. The issue lately is when the JS code is too big, not well
tuned, and gives the equivalent of several 90s-era-website-full-pageloads
worth of data with every action. That is to say a lot of websites aren't as
lean as they could be.

I'm not a web focused person so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, this is my
outsider's perspective.

~~~
karatestomp
“AJAX” when it was mostly grabbing chunks of HTML to insert or otherwise not
doing much but “grab, render” was sometimes faster. Not so much these days.

------
ohazi
All of these quotes are from business/sales/marketing people, not from
developers actually using the language, and about a third of the people quoted
have clearly mistaken it for Java.

------
nabla9
JavaScript is perfect example of Worse is Better
[http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html](http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html)

Early JavaScript sucked bad. It sucked small planets.

As PG said 2005 about Web 2.0.
[http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html)

>Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works."

~~~
BiteCode_dev
I don't think it is. If JS had any sane competition, I think it would have
lost. By some weird conjunction of events, it landed a monopoly on the most
amazing plateform in the world.

PHP is a good example of Worse is Better, because it won over the competition,
despite its flaws.

HTML vs xHTML as well. Bash, maybe?

But JS didn't win. It was the only one there.

~~~
yen223
What? JS had loads of competition back then. VBScript, Flash, and Java
applets, just to name a few ways to get interactivity on a browser.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
"sane" is the keyword here.

The alternative all depended on non technical users with slow connections to
install the runtime.

Js code was guaranteed to work anywhere, and with no requirements, giving it
practical monopoly.

------
SoylentOrange
The article conflates “popular” with “loved”. JS is popular because it’s the
only* language in which it’s possible to write browser apps and extensions.
The number of people using transpilers for this purpose is minimal.

In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible, instead using
TS or other languages that compile down to JS.

Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular is like saying
people love McDonald’s because it sells the most burgers

[*] since we don’t have Java applets or Flash apps anymore. Writing in other
languages still means transpiling to JS in the end

~~~
hombre_fatal
Meanwhile, you can use any language on the server yet many of us including
myself use Javascript. I'd say modern Javascript is easily one of the best
languages.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Most server side code is Java, quickly followed by PHP.

And of course next to JS, you have C#, Asp.Net, Ruby, Python, and Go.

I'd say that given that:

\- a lot of people only know JS (like designers)

\- JS has a monopoly on the front end and is the only language that can be
used on the front and back

\- JS has existed for as long as Java (C#, Ruby and Go are way younger)

\- there are JS materials everywhere given the web popularity

\- the web is the most popular plateform in the world

The fact, as a freelancer going from company to company, I see so little JS on
the server compared to other languages tells a lot.

------
qubex
I vividly remember working on my school’s website in 1997 with Microsoft
FrontPage. I had built a rather complicated system where it would be possible
to arrive at the same page from several origins. Whereas most web-pages had
hyperlinks or allowed the user to use the “Back” button on the browser.

I decided I was going to have none of that amateur stuff or reliance on what
is now referred to as “browser chrome” (though if the term even existed back
then, I surely wasn’t aware of it).

So I looked into this JavaScript thing, and wrote my first ever script
embedded into a button:

onclick=“javascript.history.go(-1)”

I was so proud of myself. For about a year users of my school’s website were
visibly amazed.

------
wslh
JavaScript was used for very simple things when it was launched. Most pages
used it for modifying button images when you hover or press a button, and for
handling some web form operations. As others say JavaScript was very
confusing, a programming language that was launched with Java in its name and
to fill gaps in HTML limitations but there was no clear direction towards web
app programming. Another confusing aspect was that Java was created for this
purpose (to create web apps via applets).

We should not forget Macromedia Flash, it was a very interesting option
offering a better programming language but it was not an standard with an open
source reference.

~~~
egypturnash
Actionscript 1: a simple little language that could only be entered via a huge
dropdown menu

Actionscript 2: basically Javascript, when I was writing stuff in AS2 my
O'Riley pocket JS guide saw a lot more use than the pocket AS guide.

Actionscript 3: completely ECMAScript4, Macromedia/Adobe was on the standards
board for that, but then Mozilla went a different way, I think, it is a giant
mess [1]. Also AS3 was a _lot_ more verbose than AS2 which did not endear it
to the people with one foot in art and one in programming that was a large
part of Flash's user base.

1: [https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-
es4/](https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/)

~~~
wslh
In conjuntion with AS Flash offered animation capabilities that were
impossible at the time. This animations are from 2000:
[http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html](http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html)

------
goto11
It is pretty clear none of them have any clue what JavaScript actually is.
These are "endorsements" from "partners" trying to get on the hype train. They
just want to ensure everybody that this new thing is a perfect fit for their
product.

"JavaScript allows Internet applications to easily connect to production
databases such as CA-OpenIngres"

"We plan to integrate our automatic document indexing and abstracting
technology to leverage the power and functionality of JavaScript. "

"Illustra’s unique extensible Object-Relational architecture makes it an ideal
intelligent queryable store for content management applications using Java and
JavaScript objects"

"JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to
databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave"

"The creation of a general, standard scripting language for Java development
will accelerate adoption of this new, exciting technology for delivering
dynamic, live content to the consumer."

You could replace "JavaScript" with "Machine Learning" or "Blockchain" in the
above quotes, and they would make just as much sense.

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
For me the most interesting part of the article is how virtually all the
influential companies being quoted have disappeared. America Online, Architex
(who?), Computer Associates (haven't heard _that_ one in a while), DEC, HP
(still around but a shadow of its former self), Iconovex (?), Illustra (?),
Informix (acquired by IBM), Macromedia (eaten by Adobe), Metrowerks (?), SCO,
SGI, Sybase, ...

~~~
kls
Sad part is I remember them all, it was the best of times it was the worst of
times. Be thankful you don't know who Computer Associates is. They are the
grim reaper of software. Their model is buy aging software and milk the
licences to death before the software is completely dead. Think Oracle with no
initial innovation that distinguished them from any other IT mega-corp back
then.

Metroworks built dev tooling and IDE's the where big on Mac's back in the day
and they where awesome for their time.

~~~
rwmurrayVT
Computer Associates is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. They changed
their name at some point to CA Technologies and ended up being acquired by
Broadcom sometime around the end of 2018/2019.

Another fun fact is that they had a huge accounting scandal around the dotcom
crash involving a 35 day month! They ended up settling for around 300kk USD.

Edit: They settled for 225kk USD. Sanjay got 12 years in prison and an 8kk USD
fine.

------
xenomachina
When JavaScript first came out, it couldn't do much. Aside from toys (eg:
scrolling text in the status bar) the "serious" uses were mostly:

\- (hopefully redundant) client-side validation \- some styling (CSS was also
brand new) \- basic animation (eg: changing the on-hover appearance of stuff)
\- form "tweaking" (eg: disabling/hiding parts of a form dynamically based on
other field values).

It wasn't really for writing apps in, just for adding small enhancements to
apps that did their real work server-side.

------
rdiddly
Wow, apparently JavaScript was 100% great and there was nothing at all
negative about it ever, according to people in tech!

~~~
steego
That's because they hadn't used it yet. :)

In all seriousness, everyone was in on Java. Even Microsoft (Everyone was in
on Java, even Microsoft
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B)).
So most of us saw browser plugins and applets as the future, and some of those
plug-ins were very impressive in those days.

JavaScript was seen as a glue language to manipulate components built in
better languages. We thought there was going to be a rich component
marketplace that was going to be embedded in web pages. We didn't think we'd
still be mucking around with HTML and DOM manipulations.

~~~
tabtab
I also thought Java was the future. But, Java tried to be an entire virtual
OS, and gained too many security holes because of that. Flash had a similar
fate.

It's not that JavaScript solved that, it's that it's built into the browser
such that you can't really skip it. Like the Java and Flash engine, a web
browser is also a fat bloated leaky client. However, if you toss the first
two, you are then dealing with 1 fat client instead of 3 fat clients. It's
easier to keep 1 FC up to date than 3.

~~~
steego
Do you think the security holes killed Java and Flash? Or do you think they
were just nails in the coffin?

I suspect performance and inconsistent experience killed Java applets and Sun
stopped caring about desktop Java when they realized they can't make much
money off it. Flash stuck around a lot longer than Java because it was fast,
fun and ran consistently. It still lingered for some time after Jobs poisoned
it.

Honestly, I don't think people cared that much about running updates. For most
people, if the computer tells them they need to update, they update. I also
don't think average users cared about security issues back then.

~~~
tabtab
Re: _I also don 't think average users cared about security issues back then._

Recommendations in common publications to remove them unless absolutely
necessary coincided with their market share slide, as I remember it.

Yes, Java applets was imperfect, but generally got better on every release. It
was improving about as fast as JavaScript + DOM + CSS + HTML was.

Re: _For most people, if the computer tells them they need to update, they
update._

It didn't help them in that they tried to trick you into installing extra junk
apps during the update process, like tool bars (AKA spam bars) and "free"
anti-virus scanners.

Java had a big issue with applications that needed older versions, but the
older versions often had security holes. Oracle didn't manage backward
compatibility well. Trying to be a virtual OS instead of just an app platform
contributed to the too-much-complexity-to-manage problem for Oracle. KISS.

------
myhf
No printf. Less keywords than Java. Lame.

~~~
doctor_eval
CmdrTaco will never live this down.

~~~
cmdrtaco
You have no idea.

------
billziss
I wrote my first website in 1995 and started using Javascript in 1996 (only I
think it was called Livescript back then)?

I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and
when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with
Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it.
(Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!)

My opinion of Javascript has not improved over the years. I worked with
Javascript for a while and in complex enough problems that my name ended up on
2-3 patents and patent applications. I no longer work on the web, but I have
occasional need for Javascript and I always hate my time with it.

This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its
popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant.

~~~
8bitsrule
> I think it was called Livescript back then)?

As Encyclopedia Brittanica (!! who'd have thought) puts it,

 _JavaScript was developed in 1995 at Netscape Communications Corp. and was
conceived of as a companion to Java. It was originally called Mocha and then
LiveScript before Netscape received a marketing license from Sun.[0]_

And then it became 'a dialect of ECMAScript'...

[0]
[https://www.britannica.com/technology/JavaScript](https://www.britannica.com/technology/JavaScript)

------
bryanrasmussen
I wonder what Brendan Eich actually thought about it at the time, I mean he
had and did do it pretty quickly. Was he actually thinking this will be really
cool and people will need it or was he thinking stupid pointy haired bosses,
we should use applets!

I mean the quality he did put into it argues for he thought it was really
cool, but perhaps he is so much of a craftsman he wouldn't put in less effort
on something he considered to be a bad idea (unfortunately not many people
have this admirable quality

------
projektfu
I couldn't make heads nor tails of it when it debuted. But I was only 17.

This article brings me back to a time when every product had a bunch of these
"empty suit" quotes about it. The person never said that stuff, it was all
written for them. I remember being on a project where marketing fluff was
"said" by someone who had no idea what was going on and, besides, the product
wasn't doing anything, let alone what he claimed the technology enabled it to
do.

------
cronix
I'm sure they would all love how far it's gotten. Like, on the Medium site
that we're reading this on, how they help google track you with JS by using
google sign on nagging you every damn time you visit to sign in with whatever
account you're currently signed into google in, in any of their services.

------
chadlavi
> “AT&T’s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology — it
> is support for an open standards process. Open standards are and will be as
> important to the success of the Internet as open connectivity.”

Still true, but ironic to hear a huge telco monopoly say it.

------
rathel
I wonder what the alternative reality could be in which browsers adopted Tcl
instead.

~~~
cnasc
That might be an interesting counterfactual for a blog post (or series). What
if {x} had been the dominant web scripting language?

What does that language offer that JS can’t match, and what trade offs does it
make to get there? I suppose you’d have to write a hypothetical spec for dom
APIs, etc that don’t exist in the target language, and then pretend to use it
and see what the pain points/unexpected pleasures are.

------
ww520
The language Self was just released couple years before that and I thought it
was the coolest language since sliced bread. Then Javascript came out and wow,
it incorporated the key ideas from Self.

------
pier25
The GIFs are the best part

~~~
echelon
I'm actually very disappointed in the gifs.

Most of the memes are faux retro. The fiji water bottle is representative of
the vaporwave aesthetic from 2016 or so. The font animation is also super
modern, circa early 2010s. It's all fake.

They should have pulled more stuff from Geocities archive. This is not how
things were.

------
cryptica
Based on those comments, it seems that a lot of vendors saw JavaScript as an
integration opportunity to sell their database software. It's interesting that
it didn't work out that way and JS today mostly interacts with databases via
intermediary server software.

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davidjnelson
Lol document.write in a table in Netscape 2. Still remember my first
experience with a buggy js implementation :-)

My favorite early js story is writing a “life cycle of stars” app in 4 hours
in 1997 and getting a full high school semester worth of credit for it :-)

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perl4ever
"“Paper Software plans to use JavaScript as the glue which lets our
development partners couple Java, plug-ins, and Paper’s multi-dimensional VRML
user interfaces within a distributed, online application.”"

These quotes don't sound right. I was working for an ISP around 1995ish and
telling people how to set up Trumpet WinSock and MacTCP and Internet Explorer.
Java wasn't even public yet, was it? Someone wanted an interactive web page,
so I used Perl and CGI.

"JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to
databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave, where it can
be rendered, animated and made into live interactive multimedia for the
Internet."

Live interactive multimedia? At 3.6KB/s? I remember a T1 (24 simultaneous
calls) being a big deal, now my phone seems to have about 40 times the
bandwidth.

A lot of familiar stuff came out around that general time, but it didn't
spring forth fully formed. Someone was creating what would become eBay at the
time too, but that doesn't mean it was a thing yet.

Maybe these are all genuine quotes, but they feel like they are from someone
who thinks of 1995, 1998, 2002, etc. as all being "a long time ago".

------
seemslegit
Fast forward 25 years and we have three different semantics for "not a thing"

------
ptah
It was also the scripting language for Netscape's web server

------
tobyhinloopen
I loved building JavaScript apps when JavaScript wasn’t cool yet. (2006-2010)

~~~
unreal37
I built JavaScript apps in 1995-1996... Must have been extremely uncool
then...

------
jackallis
This obviously lends the question, given it's criticism back in the day, which
PL is the next javascript?

~~~
edtechdev
Maybe it depends on what's the next platform. C/C++ was sort of a base
programming language for desktop apps, javascript for the browser, and
Objective C & Java for mobile. Server apps have been a mix of
PHP/python/java/ruby/node.js.

I guess my 2 wild guesses for the long-term future might be either or both 1)
a visual/block programming tool (which perhaps might perhaps be more usable in
virtual reality type environments) or 2) natural language programming
(programming in English and/or other natural languages), which might be more
usable in both virtual reality and chat environments.

~~~
anthk
So, Smalltalk/Pharo.

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rafaelvasco
JS was unusable for me before ES6. Hated it back then. Then ES6 came, and it
finally became usable, though not great. Types are still missing, apart from
several little things. There's Typescript but something native to the language
would be preferable;

------
ConcernedCoder
To be fair, I didn't start programming in JavaScript until 2000, but even back
then I could see that it would be a game changer for the web.

