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
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.
Well, having a platform agnostic runtime, you could throw arbitrary code at, was potentially a great deal. It was one of the founding concepts for ARPANET, which never took off, since nobody wanted to run foreign code from the network on their machines. For a platform agnostic runtime, OO may have seemed to fit well, by encapsulating data, handlers and logic into interacting objects. (This is close to the original use case for OO as described by Alan Kay.)
Fun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.
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...
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'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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
About 2 years before Javascript existed I was very much into the web, first using the Lynx browser, and later Mosaic on an Amiga. I had also been doing a lot of AREXX script programming on the Amiga at the time. I remember telling a friend "This web browser thing really needs a scripting language", like I wished AREXX (or some language) could automate the web browser.
When Javascript first came out in Netscape, my prayers were answered, and there was no looking back. I've been coding Javascript every day since it was released in Netscape.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadFun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.
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...
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.
So basically everywhere in Santa Clara County and more.
Ken Thompson built Unix over a 30 day period.
Youth - go forth and build us something cool! It might work out.
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.
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.
> 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg
The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
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.
It's time has come...
/s
(my 2c, an ex-JS guy. Sometimes I still wrangle with it)
When Javascript first came out in Netscape, my prayers were answered, and there was no looking back. I've been coding Javascript every day since it was released in Netscape.
"AT&T;'s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology -- it is support for an open standards process."