Here's what people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995
Time and time again JavaScript is crowned the most popular programming language in the World. Whether you agree with that or not, one thing's for sure: It's come a long way since its debut back in 1995.
To mark the release of JavaScript a joint press release was issued from Netscape and Sun Microsystems on December 4, 1995.
"Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."
[ . . . and some testimonials . . .]
"SCO looks forward to supporting the JavaScript language on both our OpenServer and UnixWare product lines. JavaScript will enable developers to create substantially more stimulating and interactive web-based applications than ever before, giving them the edge they need to compete for the attention of the increasingly sophisticated population of Internet users."
Richard Treadway
Vice President, Layered Products
SCO
It claimed that JavaScript would be an "easy-to-use" scripting language designed for "creating live online applications".
The press release then went on to share praise from then industry bigwigs.
Here's what members of the tech industry had to say about little old JavaScript back in 1995. Some of the companies here are still going, others....not so much.
"JavaScript brings the power of rapid multimedia application development with cross-platform mobility at both the operating system and architecture level. We are pleased to integrate this powerful language into our Developer's Program."
Mike Connors, President
America Online Technologies"JavaScript will allow us to easily create personalized applets for the Excite service. These applets, combined with the rich functionality of the Excite service, will integrate more fully into the users experience as they explore and navigate the Internet."
Graham Spencer, Chief Technology Officer
Architext Software
JavaScript is popular. Also, I would observe, based on the number of participants, that death and taxes are extremely popular!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:45AM (21 children)
VHS is more popular than Beta.
Milli Vanilli won a *Best New Artist* grammy.
Javascript? It's only natural
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:14AM
JavaScript is the most useful programming language ever created. You can thank Brendan Eich for that by using the Brave web browser today [brave.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:36AM (19 children)
VHS is more popular than Beta.
That was for very good reason. Beta lost (among consumers) for the same reason Firewire lost to USB: it was too expensive, because the one company that owned it insisted on charging ridiculous licensing fees for it, while the competing standard didn't have that impediment.
On top of that, Beta tapes had runtimes that were too short; most movies required two tapes. No one wants to change tapes in the middle of a movie. VHS didn't have this problem.
The only thing Beta was really better at was picture quality, but the sacrifices it made for that were unacceptable for the movie-viewing public.
Milli Vanilli won a *Best New Artist* grammy.
I'm sure if you looked at the history of that award for the last 20 years or so, pretty much all the best new artists have been talentless people who record companies groomed to be good performers as long as they're either lip-syncing or singing through Autotune. Pop music has been garbage for a long time.
(Score: 5, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:44AM (7 children)
That is true, and not because I'm old.
(Score: 4, Funny) by anubi on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:59AM (5 children)
I'm old, and feel the same way.
To me, damn near all this new "industrial" and "trance" sounds like either a massive traffic jam, or they threw their instruments in a washing machine.
Yup. Too damm old. But then, I no longer like much of the music I had as a kid either. And, God Forbid! I actually caught myself listening to Lawrence Well, and actually liking it!
So, I modded you funny, but I understand.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday February 25 2020, @10:16AM
Naah, you're thinking of Morbid Angel, which is an above-ground nuclear weapons test recorded live in Hell.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:24PM (2 children)
The industrial and trance music that was all the new hotness in 1994?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @09:16PM
No, that stuff all sounded like a giant *whoosh* overhead ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday February 25 2020, @09:17PM
I said I am old. What's a few more years?
At my age, I think in decades. So most things that concern me stay in a comprehensible form. Even annual things are as annoying as I used to torment Dad in the car, going to see Grandma...a constant stream of "Daddy, are we there yet?". Back then, even a minute seemed like forever, especially one spent in Church wearing an uncomfortable hot suit with a kids metabolism.
At least at my age, I can usually speak my piece without getting a whoopping for it. Now I'm just considered an old goat blowing off steam and no one pays it much mind.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:59PM
I was thinking more of the various bland pop princesses that seem to infest the airwaves now that the record companies have consolidated the industry, and stopped developing proper talent.
You know them, they all sound the same, and have substituted interesting music for rolling out the same song again and again.
I think they call music "product" now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:28PM
Ok, Boomer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:02AM (4 children)
Two more things with beta, the Sony VCRs didn't have a built-in clock so they were useless for time-shifting, and by the time VCRs became popular outside the US where NTSC meant both beta and VHS looked bad, VHS had become S-VHS which was fine with PAL.
So a beta VCR was unable to do the two things people wanted a VCR for, you couldn't time-shift because there was no clock and you couldn't play back prerecorded movies without having to get up at some point to swap tapes. It lost for very good reasons.
(Score: 5, Funny) by ze on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:37AM (1 child)
Yeah, fuck beta! wait...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday February 25 2020, @10:14AM
Naah, just fuck Sony.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday February 26 2020, @09:23AM (1 child)
A lot of those useability extras (and price reductions) were a result of the various VHS licensees competing among themselves for customers. Beta machines were only made by Sony, so if Sony didn't decide to offer it, you couldn't get it in a Beta machine.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:02AM
>A lot of those useability extras (and price reductions) were a result of the various VHS licensees competing among themselves for customers. Beta machines were only made by Sony, so if Sony didn't decide to offer it, you couldn't get it in a Beta machine.
Reminds me a lot of Apple.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:07AM (1 child)
Beta lost (among consumers) for the same reason Firewire lost to USB
Yeah, not a lot of effort was put into the consumer market beyond replacing the super 8 cameras and projectors. In broadcast they ruled the world.
Pop music has been garbage for a long time.
It's not acoustic. Ever since the instruments were electrified the whole scene went to hell. If it weren't for that, we'd still be listening to good jazz and blues, and Elvis would still be alive, singing gospel music.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @09:09AM
Electrification is one thing, but the introduction of the likes of Fruityloops (FL Studio these days apparently) meant that you didn't need musicians as much to belt out the backing track for whatever artist you wanted to put on stage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:58AM (1 child)
The no need to flip the tape over is likely the major factor.
One could see the same with videodisc, where you have to handle a LP sized optical disc half way through the movie in other to watch it all. DVD was an instant hit by comparison as it didn't need any manual interaction mid-play, and it also didn't need to be rewinded like a VHS (oh, and you could not fit a whole TV series season in the physical shelf space of a single VHS).
It is tragicomic to watch the movie industry walk into the same pitfalls as the music industry did almost a decade beforehand, as you can see much the same transition from VHS to DVD to video files as there was with cassette tapes to CD to music files.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday February 26 2020, @09:26AM
There were double-sided (flip-over) DVDs in the days before dual-layer discs. In my experience, they were more of a thing in North America than Europe.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EvilSS on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:03PM
Pop music has always been garbage. It's the music category equivalent of McDonald's.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:30PM
Linux is a many splendored thing.
Linux lifts us up where we belong.
All you need is Linux.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:50AM (6 children)
America Online
Netscape
Sun Microsystems
Javascript
... four losers in a boat.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:53AM (3 children)
Maybe SCO should have banked on javascript, instead of Unix?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:41AM (2 children)
Imagine a future where JavaScript was stunted because of SCO's ongoing lawsuits... we might've had a decent language instead!
(Score: 4, Informative) by toddestan on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:50AM (1 child)
Or we'd all be running Java applets instead.
*shudders*
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:44PM
Nah, everything would be in the cloud. Even the cloud would be in someone else's cloud. It's all clouds all the way down.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:34AM
and yet one is still very much alive and the Javascript language is growing much faster than it did before.
(Score: 5, Informative) by anubi on Tuesday February 25 2020, @05:05AM
CompuServe almost forced .GIF into that category as well with litigation, opening the door to .PNG to appease their copyright.
All too many artists have killed their babies with lawyers bought by the people who thought one could own gusts of wind.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:01AM (1 child)
That's two words for them. I can think of others...
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:14AM
What people said in 1995 about Javascript:
What people are currently saying about Javascript:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:09AM (4 children)
What timeline do we live in that I miss America Online?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:16AM
With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.
(Score: 4, Informative) by sjames on Tuesday February 25 2020, @05:32AM (2 children)
Thanks to America Online, way back in the before time, I never had to buy floppy disks. Then they went to CDROM, but I only needed so many coasters.
(Score: 4, Funny) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:27AM
I remember those days and you know, I wish AOL was still out there in some ways -- I could use an endless supply of USB sticks.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday February 26 2020, @02:40AM
LOL, yeah, and apparently they never caught on when we'd call 'em up and ask 'em to send us an install disk. And they were top quality floppies, too!
(And came with a good little modem test utility.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:14AM (12 children)
Somewhere in the 1999-2002 time window our "sales guy" CEO had the crystal clear insight: Java runs on everything, we should be coding in Java. Yeah, sure, except you already bitch that it takes 30 seconds for us to draw 8 hours worth of data on the screen, are you ready to wait 5 minutes instead? No? Well, then we should stick with C++. CEO: "but, it will get better in the future, bytecode processors, etc. etc." Me: "and, even then when your Java Bytecode processors get here in 10 years, or maybe never, they might process our data in 30 seconds, but by then C++ will be doing it in 3, which would you rather buy?"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:29AM (1 child)
Anyone who was around then knows this to be a lie. It was designed to run on set-top boxes for cable and satellite TVs to show tv show schedules, etc [wikipedia.org]. It's only when that failed that they tried to find another use for it. The internet was slow as crap, cpus were slow as crap, ram was measured in single digit megabytes, a gigabyte hard drive was 4 figures, jso slow Java fit right in.
Drink the flavour-aide, people, because it goes down really easy when you don't know history.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:53PM
For a time from about 2000 to 2007, Java was in every pre-smartphone before the iPhone. Remember all those flip phones and candy bar phones? When those went away, Java had moved into Blu Ray players. No vaccine has yet been developed, nor no exorcist powerful enough to rm -rf it yet. You see that little silver square thing on your credit card . . . oh, nevermind.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:09AM (7 children)
Back in 94 or so I was QA manager for a large project and needed to figure out how to run our tests. Tried Java, it had a 30 second load followed by a couple seconds run time. Once it got started the speed wasn't an issue, it was just that 30 second startup time. As I knew we would have a few thousand tests that would run in 2-3 seconds each that tossed Java right out.
Had I known about Python at the time I might have chosen it, but I went with Perl.
If memory servers we had a couple thousand tests, 90% automated. Those automated tests ran in about 20 minutes, the other 10% took an hour or so.
I've since learned Java and quite like it, don't take this as a knock on Java. Instead, it's a knock on version 0.1 of Java as the language was brand new at the time.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:45AM (2 children)
Fuck Java.
And FUCK YOU for liking it; you stupid idiot.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:04PM (1 child)
There are so many stupid idiots making money from Java that it has usually been in the number one spot for the last 15 years. Never below the 2nd spot. Until recently. By some measurements, Python and JavaScript are now more popular pushing Java to number 3. But Java still way higher up all charts than C#, C++ or C.
Those idiots are so stupid.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:41PM
>Those idiots are so stupid.
Does their money get them a child brides?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:52PM (3 children)
All things have their place - I was quite happy with interpreted BASIC on 8 bit micros back in 1985, and when the interpreted BASIC was too slow, you could inline a little assembly code to get the data moving better.
The final nail for Java, for me, was when browsers started locking it out for "security reasons." Now, Javascript lives on in its sandboxes, but I've never been particularly interested in sandbox programming - it certainly has its place, but it always seems too limited to do what needs doing in my work.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:08PM (2 children)
Java should NEVER have been in web browsers. For exactly the same reasons that ActiveX, Flash and Silverlight should never have been in browsers.
It required browsers to interact with the ${Java | Flash | ActiveX | Silverlight} runtime in complex ways that defy the very idea of trying to have security.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:12PM (1 child)
The illusion of security? Cambridge Analytica clearly demonstrated that wetware is hackable, no matter how secure the electronic channel is.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:39PM
When the electronic channel isn't secure, then no need to try to trick humans and risk getting a properly skeptical human.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:01PM (1 child)
When you think this has happened, it actually has not. It only appears to be an insight until practical considerations are examined.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:09PM
Forgot the /s - said CEO was a scotch soaked wet noodle of a human being, when he even qualified as being human.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:25AM (7 children)
Websites that need Javascript to show me the pictures are websites I don't need Javascript turned on for.
Websites that need Javascript to tell me a simple four-paragraph news item are websites I don't need, I don't read, and they don't last in my RSS feed.
A little Javascript here and there may be useful but its predominance actually interferes with consumption of information.
And let's not talk about the load one experiences on one's workstation, with dozens of pages open, all running client-side code.
I'm not a web designer but it seems to me that look and feel can mostly be handled by HTML/CSS. Content can be fetched with PHP, Perl, or even Python. That leaves Javascript for stuff like cycling images, but, there we are, software bloat and wasting client-side CPU cycles, so, I say, just leave the Javascript out and we'll all be a lot happier.
Basically, as a client of such websites, you should run at LEAST two browsers - and the default one should be the one with Javascript turned off.
~childo
PS: Bill Joy! Been a long time since I heard HIS name. He's a BSD guy, from Berkeley. And, I'm a guy who used SunOS 1.1 (running on a 68000 card, I think, in a VME bus), and later. I was just a kid, back then. *sigh*
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:14AM (2 children)
And when right-clicking on a link, the menu should include "open in other browser".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:23AM (1 child)
Goddamn that, brother. Nothing's more infuriating when you see a button or something with the Javascript void(0) or whatever that shit is, and instead of opening the link in a new tab, it opens the same fucking page in a new tab. Government websites especially suck ass with that kind of thing.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:10PM
But you MUST have JavaScript! Once the web page is loaded, the JavaScript can then fetch the primary article text (and advertisements) to load into the page so that you can read it.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:41AM (2 children)
There seems to be a lot of blaming of the enabler of the root cause rather than the root cause here. All the stuff that Javascript is doing that you don't like are the real problem, not Javascript. Even without Javascript as long as there are avenues to do all that shite that you don't care about it'll still happen.
Unless the economics of how the world-wide-web changes, platforms that deliver the core info/content, i.e. the Chrome browsers, etc., you want will continue to enable for those kinda stuff you're actively suppressing whether Javascript is there or not.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by shortscreen on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:08AM (1 child)
In that case, the root cause is that people are stupid and/or evil. Since no solution to that problem is presenting itself, rejecting their request to run whatever they want on your machine will have to suffice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:27PM
Or perhaps because there's little demand for it. You do realize the geek community is but a fraction of the user base. Our current economy is based on market demand rightly or wrongly.
And you're right we should block things like JS, etc. but that doesn't necessarily mean "JS is evil" because Ads. If you say JS is evil because there's no type checking or some such, that at least have some more merit to it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:16AM
Classical computing performance is going to increase by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. It will probably outpace even JavaScript's ability to make systems hang. I can't wait to see the future of software bloat. It will be glitzy and glorious.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:30AM (6 children)
"This is complete fucking bullshit! I hate it now and I'm sure I'll hate it even more later."
-Me
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:30AM (4 children)
Javascript is an awesome teaching language for fundamentals. It has the hard lessons of curly-braces and case-sensitivity but with enough automagic to keep the class from crying in frustration. And it looks like every other language and not that weird Python shit. Not that Python is bad, but a good first language should be C-like.
Java on the other hand, you have to start with the public static void main(String[] args) shit and it bogs you down and detracts from the learning when people start asking about it.
At least with C/C++ you can just do int main() or even just main() and then code and demonstrate the command line args shit later.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:30AM
> awesome teaching language
> weakly typed
No, sir, just no.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:23PM (1 child)
Python is terrible. Meaningful whitespace, might as well use brainfuck
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @10:33PM
I never understood that hate about whitespace. Is it really that big of a problem?
Maybe it is because I'm an old FORTRAN guy and I can relate to a certain amount of formatting necessity.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:15PM
How can you say that? Behold and marvel at the beauty and elegance of the Java Hello World Enterprise Edition. [github.com]
Or be awestruck by the wonderfulness of the Java FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition. [github.com]
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:36AM
That was pretty much my reaction.
"Great, so we have OOP, which is a broken philosophy, taken to its illogical conclusion so that all the idiots who drank that off-brand drink mix can double down on their collective insanity. C is fading, ASM is damn near dead, functional languages are an even smaller niche. I think I'll be a sysadmin instead."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @05:07AM (2 children)
What is this "Sun" you speak of?
What is a "SCO"?
Why do you always speak in riddles, Grandpa?
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:17AM
I think it had something to do with the Clone Wars.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:23PM
SCO is a lawsuit factory even worse than Apple. Even worse . . . (gasp!) . . . than Oracle!
SCO was originally Santa Cruz Operation. Bought by Caldera. Which then renamed itself from Caldera to SCO. Being unable to market SCO Unix, and not having success with overpriced and restrictively licensed Caldera Linux (don't ask), their CEO got a brilliant idea! Let's sue IBM (one of the biggest and most well lawyered corporations on the planet), and ask for
$3 Billion. . . uh, no . . . make that . . . $5 Billion. And we'll charge EVERY LINUX USER a $1,399.00 license fee, per CPU to merely use Linux from wherever they downloaded it from. But because SCO are such nice guys, the price is temporarily only $699.00 per cpu to run Linux! Now aren't you glad!This started March 6, 2003. Still going, in some form to this very day. The start of Groklaw coincided with SCO's lawsuit, and it was great that PJ, the blogger behind Groklaw, covered this farce of a case until well after SCO's bankruptcy in Sept 2007. Is it legal for a company to declare bankruptcy while still technically solvent, and then remain in bankruptcy continuously until this very day?
One very good thing that happened as a result of SCO. It galvanized the entire open source community. All open source projects started making sure all their license and legal ducks were nice and neat. All code having clear authorship and the proper open source license for the project.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 25 2020, @01:46PM
What I often want is to open a web page on another computer sharing the same screen. Yes, I use networked X over ssh. Browsers that use pretty animated scrolling are almost intolerable. Every frame of the animation is lovingly transported bit by bitter bit over the network when all I want is to see the final, scrolled result.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:32PM
javascript is awesome. it even lets you disable userowned hardware, like the right mouse-click menu for example.
don't we just love 'em for loading code into our browser so we can look at their picture publically available buthent denies us to download it? thank you javascript.
i suppose as long as the "private info for sale" (tracking and ad sales) business works we won't have to deal with more javascript language "upgrades" that tries to take away control from the user ...errr... hardware owner?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday February 25 2020, @05:59PM (3 children)
That is not how I recall JAVA being talked about in the mid to late 90's, it's was more eyerolling and moaning about how horrible and slow it was and that this shit would never take off. Can't recall anyone being highly in favor about javascript either when that rolled around.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @07:25PM
It is amazing how Java and JavaScript are confused and conflated until this very day. As they were in the original announcement.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:41PM (1 child)
I was doing Java in the 90's as well - yes you're right there's lots of moaning about the speed, I was one of them. However it has quite some good parts to it. It was easily to develop network and UI code that just works across Windows and Unix. Coming from a C++ background it was really easy to pickup the fundamentals.
Javascript in the 90's was really about scripting for the web. Nowadays the language itself have matured a lot and you do about anything with it as well. I can develop a lot of things with it really quickly - and as someone mentioned it is a really good tool for education - all I need is Chrome and I can have an interactive environment where the class can write (and learn) coding with immediate results all in Chrome. No need for IDE setup, runtime installs, code builder, etc. Sure all those are important at some point, but for beginner level coding I find it overwhelms a lot of folks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @05:27PM
The semantics of Javascript are God awful.
A scripting language WOULD be easier to use to teach programming, but man the popular ones simply don't have a clean and general model for teaching the basics. Scripting languages all seem to have been written quickly by an amateur.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:38AM
1995: "It sucks!"
2020: "It still sucks!"