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Ask HN: How would today's world look without JavaScript?

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JavaScript is literally everywhere, even the settings in the new macOS are built in ReactJS, 99% of websites use JavaScript. Even our home machines are working with JavaScript like your smart washing machine or fridge.

So this is what I wonder, what would the world look like if JavaScript was never created?

8 comments

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emteycz
We'd be using VBScript.

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/vbscript/vbscript_events.htm

krapp
Yeah, running code on the web was always going to be a thing one way or another (there was a time when it was even considered a good idea) and one language would have won out, because in hindsight having browsers support runtimes for multiple languages was probably not feasible.

Maybe with Webassembly we can revisit the model of a web that supports multiple programming languages. Either way, I'd rather have Javascript than VBScript.

nonrandomstring
I can tell you. My entire web experience is JavaScript free on a day-to-day basis.

It's fast.

It's more free from distractions.

It's accessible (plain text to copy-paste or feed a screen reader)

It's more secure.

It's limited.

The last of these is a bit obvious, and seems like a problem, until you try it and realise it's not. About 10% of websites will absolutely not run at all without JavaScript, and those seem to be the BigTech, low information density, low quality ones I can do without. So I take the "limitation"to be a feature, a free filter I get that weeds out a lot of the rubbish,

Once or twice a week there's about 0.5% of "essential" sites where I am effectively _forced_ to use JavaScript. For those I have a separate laptop.

muzani
Curious if essential sites include Google and YouTube. I tried running YouTube on my wife's old Win XP laptop and it refuses to load.
nonrandomstring
Google basic search was fine without js last time I used it, but I choose not to use it. Instead I use a range of smaller search engines.

Youtube is unusable (I mean even on a normie browser) - it's a crazy mass of popups, frames, ever shifting css, things that jump around when you hover over... like a 90's Geocities site.

What I do is use duckduckgo (through the hidden service) to look for videos I want (it indexes all of them fine, but crafting the search terms is challenging), then just grab them using youtube-dl.

Increasingly though, search hits for lectures or talks I am looking for come up on sites other than youtube, and given the choice I'll download from the non-google one. Youtube-dl works with a surprising range of sites.

elviejo
Obligatory Simpsons reference: "Can you imagine a world without lawyers?" [0]

But basically without JavaScript we would have used Java applets and the Java Virtual machine.

So your browser would actually be a hypervisor where each "tab" is actually a container for the JVM. An inside that container you could execute any language that compiles to the JVM. Different apps would run in it even a web browser would run on it!....

A little bit like what wasm is trying to accomplish now but 25 years earlier.

[O] https://youtu.be/uG3uea-Hvy4