What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017) (opens in new tab)

Because the way I remember it, technical people hated it with a passion, from its design to its implementation.

In fact, the most popular JS projects have always been to avoid writing ES5, its DOM API, or depending of one of its implementation:

- scriptaculous: we hate even the basic types, so we monkey patch our own code into it.

- jquery: don't use any of the language paradigms and use ones from Lisp and Haskell. Avoid "this". Don't touch the DOM. In fact, don't code, just make a few calls and pass parameters. And we rewrite the whole damn browser API to avoid incompatibilities.

- GWT: write JS from Java.

- underscore and co: let's rewrite typeof, the equality sign and array manipulation methods. And provide an stdib for god sake.

- coffeescript: we like Python and ruby but must do JS.

- React: HTML in JS now please. And magic DOM. Oh, and prototyping is horrible, lets use classes. And we strongly advice immutability, but do what you please...

- webpack and babel: ES6 and 7 are not here yet, but ES5 is so bad we will setup an entire ecosystem dedicated to make believe they are. Also pretend import works like in other languages.

- typescript: ok, we were wrong, ES7 is not enough. Not nearly enough. Please make intellisense works.

Now, in 2020, JS is finally not so horrible to work with. You can use map(), () => and "..." and fake namespaces. Which is amazing to access the crazy cool plateforms that the modern browsers and the web are.

So I guess, in a way, this quote from the AOL guy was true.

It's easy to forget, but for years after its introduction JavaScript didn't work well. It was extremely slow, limiting the complexity of what could be built with it. There were problems galore with cross-browser compatibility of what was written. There was no reliable vector graphics or canvas system, so you really couldn't do much graphically. The DOM interface was hard to understand to be charitable. It didn't run outside of the browser, so how dare you call yourself a developer if you were using it?

To the extent that developers knew JavaScript existed at all, it was not considered a programming language.

These things started to change in the early 2000. So deeply ingrained with the disgust for JavaScript, that it took a very long time for the consensus to emerge that you could actually build very complex software on a post-V8 runtime.

The promise of the web was cross platform applications that required no installation. Microsoft's fear was that cross platform applications would make the operating system irrelevant and reduce Windows lock-in. Both Sun (with Java) and Netscape wanted Microsoft's worst fears to happen.

This was the era of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. So Microsoft embraced the web and added a variety of extensions that only worked on Internet Explorer and Windows. The browser wars followed, which Microsoft resoundingly won.

Along the way, Microsoft demonstrated the power of their browser by doing everything that they could to encourage people to write web applications that would only run on Internet Explorer. Which, of course, only ran on Windows. One of the things that they did was write web versions of Microsoft applications using various Microsoft extensions.

One of those applications was Microsoft Outlook. Which needed to poll the server and find out if there was new mail. For that purpose they wrote the first version of the XmlHttpRequest object. This was in 1999 and they thought nothing more of it...until gmail and then Google Maps came out in 2004 and demonstrated what could be done with it.

The next thing you know, everyone is talking AJAX. Mozilla makes the web accessible to the world. And then Google decided to throw serious energy into a better JavaScript runtime (aka V8) because they wanted to be able to write more sophisticated applications.

And the result is that Microsoft's nightmare has now been realized. But none of it could have happened without that fateful decision to supply the missing piece for a ton of applications of having an asynchronous way to go back for more data without loading another web page.

In 1999 I worked on a contract for Levi's in SF and clearly remember using JavaScript to pull data from a huge hierarchy of product styles and presenting it to the end user as a widget where they could add/remove/move entries around. I remember abusing the cookies API to save the latest client state between page refreshes as it was the only real way to do that at the time. Something like this would have been a total pain in the ass without logic in the browser. In fact, I may have been replacing some sort of Java Applet or ActiveX widget which did something similar in a slower, less flexible way.

So whether it was a huge success outside of corporations or not, I was using it to make a living pretty much from day one.

Early JavaScript sucked bad. It sucked small planets.

As PG said 2005 about Web 2.0. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html

>Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works."

In actual fact, most people try to avoid JS whenever possible, instead using TS or other languages that compile down to JS.

Saying people love JavaScript because it’s the most popular is like saying people love McDonald’s because it sells the most burgers

[*] since we don’t have Java applets or Flash apps anymore. Writing in other languages still means transpiling to JS in the end

I decided I was going to have none of that amateur stuff or reliance on what is now referred to as “browser chrome” (though if the term even existed back then, I surely wasn’t aware of it).

So I looked into this JavaScript thing, and wrote my first ever script embedded into a button:

onclick=“javascript.history.go(-1)”

I was so proud of myself. For about a year users of my school’s website were visibly amazed.

We should not forget Macromedia Flash, it was a very interesting option offering a better programming language but it was not an standard with an open source reference.

"JavaScript allows Internet applications to easily connect to production databases such as CA-OpenIngres"

"We plan to integrate our automatic document indexing and abstracting technology to leverage the power and functionality of JavaScript. "

"Illustra’s unique extensible Object-Relational architecture makes it an ideal intelligent queryable store for content management applications using Java and JavaScript objects"

"JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave"

"The creation of a general, standard scripting language for Java development will accelerate adoption of this new, exciting technology for delivering dynamic, live content to the consumer."

You could replace "JavaScript" with "Machine Learning" or "Blockchain" in the above quotes, and they would make just as much sense.

- (hopefully redundant) client-side validation - some styling (CSS was also brand new) - basic animation (eg: changing the on-hover appearance of stuff) - form "tweaking" (eg: disabling/hiding parts of a form dynamically based on other field values).

It wasn't really for writing apps in, just for adding small enhancements to apps that did their real work server-side.

I was not impressed. On the client side I would use it for very few things and when I tried the server side version I decided that I would rather stick with Perl and CGI. Although I did not like Perl, I could get things done with it. (Oh, I just remember: also Cold Fusion!)

My opinion of Javascript has not improved over the years. I worked with Javascript for a while and in complex enough problems that my name ended up on 2-3 patents and patent applications. I no longer work on the web, but I have occasional need for Javascript and I always hate my time with it.

This will be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I am perplexed by its popularity, because it is neither simple nor elegant.

I mean the quality he did put into it argues for he thought it was really cool, but perhaps he is so much of a craftsman he wouldn't put in less effort on something he considered to be a bad idea (unfortunately not many people have this admirable quality

This article brings me back to a time when every product had a bunch of these "empty suit" quotes about it. The person never said that stuff, it was all written for them. I remember being on a project where marketing fluff was "said" by someone who had no idea what was going on and, besides, the product wasn't doing anything, let alone what he claimed the technology enabled it to do.

Still true, but ironic to hear a huge telco monopoly say it.

My favorite early js story is writing a “life cycle of stars” app in 4 hours in 1997 and getting a full high school semester worth of credit for it :-)

These quotes don't sound right. I was working for an ISP around 1995ish and telling people how to set up Trumpet WinSock and MacTCP and Internet Explorer. Java wasn't even public yet, was it? Someone wanted an interactive web page, so I used Perl and CGI.

"JavaScript is a great way to get cross-platform scriptable access to databases and move the resulting data into Macromedia Shockwave, where it can be rendered, animated and made into live interactive multimedia for the Internet."

Live interactive multimedia? At 3.6KB/s? I remember a T1 (24 simultaneous calls) being a big deal, now my phone seems to have about 40 times the bandwidth.

A lot of familiar stuff came out around that general time, but it didn't spring forth fully formed. Someone was creating what would become eBay at the time too, but that doesn't mean it was a thing yet.

Maybe these are all genuine quotes, but they feel like they are from someone who thinks of 1995, 1998, 2002, etc. as all being "a long time ago".