What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

https://medium.com/dailyjs/heres-what-people-in-tech-had-to-say-about-javascript-when-it-debuted-in-1995-a4b81dc05b71

by philnash • 6 years ago

140 235 6 years ago

jbob2000• 6 years ago

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.

danaliv• 6 years ago

Yeah, this is all marketing/partnership fluff. I'd be much more interested in seeing flame wars from Usenet. :) I was programming back then but I don't remember what the sentiment was at the time. I just remember Microsoft insisting on calling it "JScript" or "ActiveScript" or something because they didn't want to give Java any mindshare over ActiveX.

jasonhansel• 6 years ago

Yep. IE went so far as to add support for VBScript (a language based on visual basic) to compete.

danmg3• 6 years ago

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.

jherdman• 6 years ago

This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.

asveikau3• 6 years ago

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.

pimlottc• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t say it was unliked. It enabled image rollovers and people _loved_ those.

l33tman• 6 years ago

As far as I can remember, people didn't really think much about it, after all without all the modern libraries the language was useless, and browsers were only marginally able to run Active-X and Java stuff anyway so people weren't even into the mindset that "this new language could be used to write web apps".

To me as a regular user, JavaScript was only there to do annoying popups at the start.

Funny how some things never change...

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

Back then, most all the Javascript you ever saw was client-side form validation. Single-page-apps were still a long way off, so all web apps were built in form submission style: the user fills out some form data, it gets sent to the server, the server tells them they filled it out wrong and re-presents the form to the user. You could make that a little more user-friendly by having Javascript validate the form _before_ the users submitted it: but you had to validate it again on the server side because the user might have Javascript turned off, or might be a hacker. That meant that, for most web developers, Javascript just meant extra work: you had to duplicate your form-validation logic in a very finicky, untestable, untyped programming language. Browser makers were working on adding some flashier stuff like drop-down menus and image rollovers, but they didn’t work across different browsers (all both of them), so even the few people who did know how to use the extensions were encouraged not to. It seemed like everybody who could avoid Javascript did - I can’t really for the life of me understand how the early Javascript developers actually got anything done in it. It was a really painful way to develop software until maybe ten years ago.

keithnz• 6 years ago

it was something to do very simple things to enhance websites usability. I don't really remember anyone particularly liking it. It was something you tended to learn as little of in a very reluctant way.

More exciting was things like Java applets or Flash. I did a bunch of stuff with Java applets and was quite impressed in 95-96 when java first came out. I wrote some simple 2d games (falling block puzzle games) which got semi popular. No way to do that in the js world at the time.

blablabla123• 6 years ago

I remember doing a tutorial from a computer magazine in the 90s. The article was presenting the basic features like for, while, if... So I thought wow, now I can program stuff in the web browser. The tutorial was then starting with hands-on code, like

    document.writeln("Hello world!");

Seems quite a natural thing to do when coming from other languages. But after playing around with it for an afternoon, I came to the conclusion: that's too difficult, I rather spend my time on something else. (If I remember correctly, at that time I was comfortable with Basic and had a little exposure to C++ and Pascal)

pier25• 6 years ago

The GIFs are the best part

echelon• 6 years ago

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.

aazaa• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

monocasa2• 6 years ago

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.

steego13• 6 years ago

They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project.

Updates were often committed live using remote scripting (A precursor to AJAX) and we did a lot of DOM manipulation to update content in-place. At that time, we targeted IE because Netscape's support for DOM manipulation was abysmal.

While I have to give Gmail credit where it's due, I have to give Firefox the real credit for doing the hard work and finally releasing an alternative to IE that kicked JavaScript into high gear. If Gmail had never happened, it would have only been a matter of time before SPAs were going to become a thing. There were more of us doing it before Gmail than most people realize.

dylan604• 6 years ago

It was my impression that Gmail's big hit was its use of AJAX more than just its use of Javascript in general. Until then, it was just this obscure thing MS created, but it wasn't really used in the wild until Gmail.

scarface743• 6 years ago

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The first large scale use of AJAX was Microsoft using it in Outlook Mail for the web in 2000.

lowercased2• 6 years ago

I seem to remember oddpost.com doing 'Ajax email' pretty significantly in 2002/2003, well before gmail.

asiachick• 6 years ago

Please don't repeat this non-fact. There were plenty of large SPAs before GMail. Oddpost existed 2 years before Gmail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost

It also felt more like an app than gmail ever has given it had the "standard" 3 panel look of most desktop email apps (same as most of them do today like Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple's Mail)

And before that Outlook had a browser version that acted like a SPA since 1997.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web

In fact I'm pretty sure that's why Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

unreal372• 6 years ago

"Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing"

I don't know what you were doing in 1995 and 1996, but I was building Javascript apps. They were "a thing" for me at least.

swiley• 6 years ago

Gmail is a great example of everything that sucks about web applications. Poor information density, crap sliding around underneath your mouse everytime you go to click, GUI changing every month, ambiguous pictograms everywhere.

Maybe users like native applications because native app programming sucks and it weeds out people who carelessly build things like that.

blahyawnblah• 6 years ago

Outlook was the first true web 2.0 (or SPA) website. It's what XHR was built for.

bfung• 6 years ago

It wasn't gmail -- it was google maps that really made everyone look again at javascript. Although MS added XMLHTTPRequest, it took something like google maps that pushed it further than anyone thought at the time to make JS a real thing.

NicoJuicy• 6 years ago

Gmail was user friendly, but that's it.

I think the v8-runtime changed a lot for Javascript, although it was already normal to use then

nickthemagicman3• 6 years ago

Jquery was invented and became massive for decades because it made js basically suck less.

tabtab7• 6 years ago

To an extent, yes, but didn't entirely solve the problem. When something goes wrong with Jquery or something that uses it, Jquery is yet another layer to debug or break. There's a point where throwing more layers at a problem has diminishing returns.

The solution (for CRUD makers) is to make common desktop GUI idioms part of a standard instead of emulate them all. This includes but is not limited to: MDI windowing (as an option), modal panels, drop-down menus, tabs, combo boxes, editable column-expandable data grids, expandable trees, tool bars, and a decent multi-select widget instead of using (just) the Ctrl key. HTML frames were helpful, but have since been deprecated. Somebody found them too useful? Mobile land is too different from desktop land. Forcing a lowest common denominator is bad for business IT productivity.

JimDabell3• 6 years ago

jQuery was invented for basically two reasons, neither of them about making JavaScript suck less.

1. Introduce a "chaining" API.

2. Paper over the differences between how browsers implemented the DOM, with events being the big issue.

Note that the DOM is not JavaScript and JavaScript is not the DOM. The DOM is a language-agnostic API for manipulating markup-based documents.

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

didn't work well.

And nearly impossible to debug on top of that. Firebug didn't come around until 2005, and AFAIK that was the first interactive debugger for Javascript. In fact, I remember spending a lot of time debugging without even console.log() support - window.alert() was the only weapon you had for the longest time. Not to mention every Javascript implementation's frustrating habit of just throwing up a blank page instead of an error message if anything was wrong...

johannes12343212• 6 years ago

Before firebug there was Venkman debugger (mind the Ghostbusters theme) as Firefox (or Firebird and Netscape Navigator 9) as well as Thunderbird and their other components where built using JavaScript+XUL (pronounced Zool, as in Ghostbusters)

strbean• 6 years ago

And god forbid you got yourself in an alert() loop!

NeoBasilisk2• 6 years ago

It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well.

I haven't forgotten, and I will never forget.

tabtab7• 6 years ago

Re: It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well.

And STILL doesn't, at least for anything non-trivial. New browser brands or version often "break" a lot of libraries and code. It's not really JS's fault: HTML wasn't meant to be emulate real desktops, and shoehorning it to do so has made a giant tangled multi-layer mess.

Browser standards should be split into three focus areas:

1. DOC: Document-oriented for text display and editing. It would be similar to existing browser but with more word-processing-like features. [I removed "read only"]

2. GUI: Mouse-centric stateful GUI markup for data-oriented "productivity" CRUD applications.

3. ART: charts, games, music, and movies.

The one-size-fits-all "standard" mostly failed (job security aside), time to split and focus. Let's admit we f!!! up as an industry.

Polylactic_acid• 6 years ago

The problem is most pages need to fall in to 1 and 2. Wikipedia is a document website but it also has editing features and it also has interactive mouse things like the hover previews.

underwater• 6 years ago

Websites don't exist in neat silos. Web technologies like JS aren't perfect, but they haven't failed be any stretch of the imagination. What other platforms are still alive and evolving decades after their creation?

agumonkey5• 6 years ago

I used to think so, but with reactive components and css layout like grid, you have enough clear paths for most use. This dom thing seems like it's here to stay for a few decades more.

AgentME• 6 years ago

New browser brands or version often "break" a lot of libraries and code.

When has it happened that browsers have broken standardized features? Browsers have gone through large lengths to stay backwards compatible. It's hard for me to think of things that have been broken besides nonstandardized stuff (like plugins, or things that only worked in one browser to begin with like IE).

technion• 6 years ago

Back when I first played with Javascript I don't think anyone even used the name. Tutorials were all about "DHTML", where you were building "Dynamic HTML" by writing Javascript to move items around.

geerlingguy• 6 years ago

It seemed like 99% of the Javascript I found was little hacks to have some string of text move around with your cursor, or to make the status bar scroll some text.

wyclif2• 6 years ago

I remember those times. Things like DHTML clocks.

Endy• 6 years ago

Well, if by 'for years', you mean 25 years, you're right. ECMAScript is still hot garbage that clogs up computers and the internet, ballooning requirements on browsers and nearly forcing the monoculture we have in terms of browsers and rendering. If you want a website, you should write a website. If you want a program, you should write a program. Don't write programs to run in the same space as websites.

emtel• 6 years ago

Don't write programs to run in the same space as websites.

Who do you imagine is going to find this advice compelling?

thrower123• 6 years ago

Java Applets over current connections, on current hardware, and written with Kotlin would be pretty nice. Especially if we still had plain old HTML and CSS too for non-applications.

outworlder• 6 years ago

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.

I wonder how history would have looked like if Scheme had been used instead, as was the original intention.

Or perhaps, Lua.

BoiledCabbage• 6 years ago

Much better if it had gone with Scheme

steego13• 6 years ago

To be honest, I was using JavaScript for years as an OOP language before I actually understood how I could use JavaScript as a functional language.

However, I don't think the limitation was the language. The biggest limitation really were bug ridden browsers. Trying to get something to work across all browsers was incredibly challenging because so many basic features simply didn't work.

Had the syntax been based on scheme, my guess is scheme's reputation would have suffered. I think people have a tendency to blame the thing that they understand the least, so I could see people blaming scheme for the browser's failings.

Also, I went to a university that taught SICP and I'm sorry to say it wasn't popular. Again, when things didn't work, there was a tendency to blame the thing that was least understood.

I could see a Lua-like syntax being approachable, but even that wouldn't have helped. Again, the biggest problem with JavaScript was being tethered to buggy browsers that often failed when you asked them to do simple things.

goto114• 6 years ago

Then everyone would hate scheme now :-) The primary problems with JavaScript was browser incompatibilities and bugs, mostly related to the DOM, and a limited standard library. Using a different language syntax wouldn't have alleviated those problems.

But I like the idea of angle brackets for content and parentheses for script.

shados• 6 years ago

I remember dealing with JS early on the same way I deal with bash today. With all the weird apis no one understood at the time, limited internet resources (and even books at first), it was just a crazy quest to hunt someone who knew what to do, copy it, and try to tweak it (usually unsuccessfully) until something kind of sortoff does what you want.

dillonmckay2• 6 years ago

I always thought the big paradigm shift was the introduction of xmlhttprequest.

Prior to that, it was really just form validation and cool DHTML interactions.

I also wonder why AJAX is not called AJAJ?

JimDabell3• 6 years ago

The "X" in the acronym comes from XMLHttpRequest, an API that was originally provided by Internet Explorer to enable fetching XML in Outlook Web Access. It wasn't until later that fetching JSON with it became popular – XMLHttpRequest predates JSON by a few years.

thdrdt• 6 years ago

This is why you could charge a lot of money for rollover effects (most of the time image swapping).

JavaScript was hard.

I remember writing complex graphic applications in Director. But I think it took at least 10 years before the same was possible in JavaScript.

dvfjsdhgfv• 6 years ago

It didn't run outside of the browser, so how dare you call yourself a developer if you were using it?

That's not exactly accurate, you could actually do some server-side things with it and I knew people who did it (late 90s, early 00s) - although I never understood why and the company went bankrupt in the end.

myhf• 6 years ago

No printf. Less keywords than Java. Lame.

bloopernova• 6 years ago

Being downvoted by people that don't know their Slashdot+iPod history:

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

kazinator• 6 years ago

Sibling comment identifies obscure Slashdot meme from 2001.

Have an upvote.

doctor_eval• 6 years ago

CmdrTaco will never live this down.

cmdrtaco• 6 years ago

You have no idea.

ConcernedCoder• 6 years ago

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.

qubex• 6 years ago

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.

rdiddly• 6 years ago

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

steego13• 6 years ago

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). 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.

tabtab7• 6 years ago

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.

clarry2• 6 years ago

according to people in tech!

According to CEOs and other businessmen making statements for the press hype machine.

russellbeattie• 6 years ago

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.

johannes12343212• 6 years ago

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++.

projektfu• 6 years ago

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.

btilly2• 6 years ago

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.

interestica• 6 years ago

I've been listening to the podcast 'Cautionary Tales' about the unintended consequences of certain actions. This seems like it would fit well as a great story.

majormajor• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

slivanes• 6 years ago

Back before XmlHttpRequest, you could "poll" for server information using a hidden IFRAME.

XmlHttpRequest + JSON formalized this type of data transfer.

kls2• 6 years ago

Was going to mention this, it was pretty popular for those of us building corp intranet applications at the time. Not a lot of people used it for generally available web application but there where a few. Several of the web chat applications of the time used it extensively.

agumonkey5• 6 years ago

game is not over, MS has typescript momentum now

mcv• 6 years ago

Yeah, but that doesn't drive any kind of lock-in.

thedance5• 6 years ago

Microsoft did a really great job of making MSIE a platform, too, with active scripting you could write browser programs in REXX or Tcl. It was really wide open.

btilly2• 6 years ago

But nobody could view your web page unless they had downloaded the appropriate scripting language.

That made it appropriate for intranet applications, but not the internet.

billziss• 6 years ago

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.

phillipkang• 6 years ago

I think the accessibility of web browsers and npm allowed the JavaScript ecosystem to explode, hence it's staying power.

jiofih• 6 years ago

Why do you hate it? It’s one of the friendliest languages in current use, a nice mix of OO and FP, with top-notch tooling everywhere, and incredible performance for an interpreted language.

8bitsrule• 6 years ago

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

gwbas1c• 6 years ago

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

If you're going to do in browser development, what choice so you have? I can understand server-side JavaScript, mostly to avoid cognitive load from learning two languages.

Otherwise, I think WebAssembly is a lot more promising of a technology.

tobyhinloopen• 6 years ago

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

unreal372• 6 years ago

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

seemslegit• 6 years ago

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

xenomachina• 6 years ago

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.

rathel• 6 years ago

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

cnasc• 6 years ago

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.

badsectoracula2• 6 years ago

Instead of complaining about `==` developers would complain about substitution rules :-P.

timbit42• 6 years ago

Should have been Scheme or Logo, although Tcl would be high on my list.

thedance5• 6 years ago

MSIE scripting did and does support Tcl.

ohazi• 6 years ago

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.

wslh2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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/

wslh2• 6 years ago

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

bdefore• 6 years ago

As your source indicates, it was Microsoft that stonewalled ES4. By the time Adobe agreed to let it die, it was a capitulation that they had been vetoed.

type0• 6 years ago

Flash embraced ActionScript (ECMAscript 4) when no-one did and ultimately it also killed it. This is like some tree that allows the strangler fig to grow on it.

agumonkey5• 6 years ago

I remember macromedia Dreamweaver magic rollover templates.

ww520• 6 years ago

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.

nabla9• 6 years ago

JavaScript is perfect example of Worse is Better 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

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

BiteCode_dev9• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

SoylentOrange• 6 years ago

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

danShumway• 6 years ago

In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible

Eh... if this was actually true, the web would look very different. I just can't square "web programmers hate Javascript" with "web programmers are obsessed with SPAs/CSS-in-JS/NodeJS backends/etc..."

Writing in other languages still means transpiling to JS in the end

I'm assuming you already know about WASM, but if you don't, the future is starting to look relatively optimistic for other languages on the web. Still some problems to solve, but C++/Rust already have pretty promising toolchains working today.

mr_toad2• 6 years ago

Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular

I’m sure it gets a lot of hate just because of its dominance.

Domenic_S2• 6 years ago

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

Ok I give up, why is this wrong?

9nGQluzmnq3M2• 6 years ago

The 101 is the busiest freeway in the Valley, but I doubt many people love it...

hombre_fatal2• 6 years ago

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_dev9• 6 years ago

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.

_-___________-_• 6 years ago

JS is used on the server because there are tons of JS developers thanks to it being basically the only language used on the frontend.

erikpukinskis2• 6 years ago

Transpiling sucks. It breaks debugging. The JavaScript community tolerates it but you can bet everyone who can avoid it will do so. We’re in the transpilation age, which does, as you indicate, provide an “in” for other languages.

But for me, JavaScript is not about having your dinner made just how you like it. It’s about targeting the lowest common denominator and keeping your code simple because of that.

I think that’s where JavaScript is headed in the limit. We’re at the low point for “just put a file in the browser, it’ll work!” But I guarantee you that style will come back in the next wave. You already see people going that way today. Casting off Babel and using much simpler packaging tools with code that’s natively readable in the most common browsers.

Would you package Rust for the JVM? Maybe. But it would not be fun.

rafaelvasco• 6 years ago

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;

jackallis• 6 years ago

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

edtechdev• 6 years ago

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.

anthk3• 6 years ago

So, Smalltalk/Pharo.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

Do you mean "heavily criticized, with significant flaws, but might grow into something with massive use"?

Go, maybe? Or is it not flawed enough and not criticized enough? Or is it already used too heavily?

clarry2• 6 years ago

Not flawed enough, not criticized enough, and not growing into massive use. It's got its niche but there seems to be some competition.

krapp• 6 years ago

Any language that compiles to WASM.

erikpukinskis2• 6 years ago

Find a runtime environment that will ship on every major device this year. Any language that can (relatively) cleanly target that runtime could be the next JavaScript in 10 years.

But your question is equivalent to “what Nation could be the next United States”.

Possible serious answers to your question... which language might be on every device in 10 years... some successor to Solidity might Trojan horse it’s way in. If Facebook built a, like, a “Facebook Platform” or something like that, that could be on every device. Other than that, it’s hard to imagine.

JavaScript came from an era of global platforms. That’s over, now we’re in the era of fractured platforms. I don’t think we’ll see another global platform in a long time. It would need a major new selling point (like Solidity has) that can’t be replicated on existing platforms.

perl4ever• 6 years ago

"“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".

davidjnelson• 6 years ago

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 :-)

chadlavi• 6 years ago

“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.

cronix• 6 years ago

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.

9nGQluzmnq3M2• 6 years ago

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, ...

kls2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

BiteCode_dev9• 6 years ago

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.

thiht• 6 years ago

I don't understand the comparison between jQuery and lisp/Haskell, can you elaborate?

BiteCode_dev9• 6 years ago

For Haskell, when doing:

    $("foo").stuff().bar().res()

jQuery feels like the list monad, if you see chaining as similar to bind and $() not so far from return.

And for Lisp, jquery provided error handlers instead of relying on native try/except.

Of course, it's more inspired from it than the real thing, but it's far from any JS paradigm of the time. Remember that JS didn't even have map() and the only place you used your first class functions was to setInterval. Plus the joke is funnier that way :)

mettamage• 6 years ago

- 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.

They just peeked over at their low level programming neighbours and realized what they did to avoid programming assembly and program C instead was a smart idea.

z3t42• 6 years ago

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.

austincheney2• 6 years ago

The DOM is also very slow.

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

inkeddeveloper2• 6 years ago

Are you okay?

Pmop• 6 years ago

I've just began to learn ES5 and ES6. I've compiled a small list of JS quirks, things that I'd take for granted because they're well stablished in other high level programming languages. For instance, 'for/in' picks the keys instead of the values of either array or dictionary ( object in JS terms I think), dictionary doesn't have a keys 'method' but you can call Object.keys for that functionality, arrays are key/value indexed, so array['a']=1 is valid, and so on. I've lost a little while just laughing when I learned about how ES5 does OO.

JS oftentimes reminds of Apple: there's the industry standard or some already well stablished way of doing things, and they go like "Well, flip it. We're doing our own way, just because".

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

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

cryptica• 6 years ago

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.

ptah• 6 years ago

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

goto114• 6 years ago

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.

What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017)

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