alt Hacker News30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript"
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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. 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...
Seems 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.
Love 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
Quick 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.
Right 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.
That 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.
The 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.
It was actually created in around 10 days by Brendan Elch at Netscape, originally called Mocha.
"Don't trust anyone over 30." -Jack Weinberg
It'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.
JavaScript 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
anyone got a time machine? lets go back in time and change their specification to typescript
alert('Yay!');
“This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I thought JavaScript was originally called LiteScript?
Would've been nice if they'd also released a decent standard library at the same time.
[dead]
If 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)
And with that, the internet started to die
> 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.
It’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.