> 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.
This is such a weirdly antagonistic take. Javascript was out there first, and it was good enough, and a vast improvement over both flash and java in the browser. There's no guarantee that some committee designed language would have ever made it out to the public, let alone that it ever would have gotten any kind of uptake, or that it would have been better than javascript.
JS at the time was obviously thrown together in a huge rush as a very poorly designed landgrab during the dotcom IPO goldrush.
"Designed by committee" as the alternative is a false dichotomy.
There was already much better work in languages for this kind of purported requirement of non-programmer (or less-programmer) use. JS obviously didn't even try to address those users.
And there were certainly better languages for letting full-programmers accomplish the same things.
Even Sun themselves internally had better work on multimedia Web browser at the time.
Instead, some team just threw anything at being able to make the press release they wanted to make, ASAP, not caring whether it was trash, or they could've even done better within the press release time constraint if they cared.
There's a market out there, and a first-mover advantage. Technologies are embedded in and product of existing political, social, and economic processes, not standalone entities.
Think of all the other "worse" languages that triumphed over their purported betters.
I agree that first mover advantage is an important concept. I don't know how much it applies to the JS launch situation, but there was definitely a rush.
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.