> 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
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.
The Java hype was totally unprecedented and probably never repeated. The CEO of a big tech company was on network TV promoting a programming language. I heard stories on NPR in the car. My mother called me to ask me "about this Java thing." Java was everywhere and going to be in everything.
In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.
That's also why Apple renamed OpenStep to Cocoa. Java was supposed to be the primary development language for Mac OS X (because Java and Cocoa go great together).
> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
Sun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
Can confirm. The dot-com era startups I was involved with all had Oracle DB on Sun hardware. Apache was common. Java was somewhat common if you could deal with its slowness. C++ was common if you could deal with memory problems or needed more speed / efficiency than Java.
The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting.
I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
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...
It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger.
Doesn't that article contradict your statement? It gives a bunch of examples of companies supporting open source for sound business reasons, and then claims that Sun is doing stuff with unsound business motivations.
This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight.
But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java.
Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”.
Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
I think the motivation is backwards. Many employees and even executives are highly motivated by moral arguments. They want to do good in the world, and get paid for it. But to do so they have to justify it with a business case.
IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion."
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice.
Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)
Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
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.
Some seems to be server-side, as well, which was a Netscape product long before Node.js, but I'm not sure if this was already available, then. (When was the Netscape Enterprise server launched?)
I'm also not too sure, if LiveConnect (the connection between JS and Java applets and vice versa) was already a thing, when JavaScript was announced. (I think, this came a little later.)
For sure. And, to quote the Systems Bible: Any complex working system is only the result of the growth of a simple working system. It works. It worked then, and it works now. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. Replacing it is likely impossible.
> He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.
FWIW... I worked with Brendan @ Mozilla for over a year. Dude expressed zero problems with my queer lifestyle that I didn't hide. I think the problem people had with Brendan was not his opposition for same-sex marriage, but his support for an organization that opposed same-sex marriage. It's a subtle distinction, but one worth making. People are complex.
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
Hmm. Trying to remember if places I've worked at talked about "The Intranet" or "the intranet." I guess you could use "Intranet" as a proper noun if you're talking about the one in use at your company but then "intranet" if you're talking about the concept of an internet inside your company's firewall that's not connected to the Internet.
> 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.
Love the optimism of this bit:
> 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
I read this as a negative. As in, as soon as someone without experience touches JavaScript, everything becomes complex quickly.
Which is probably somewhat true now in the GenAI + over-engineered framework age.
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.
The Java hype was totally unprecedented and probably never repeated. The CEO of a big tech company was on network TV promoting a programming language. I heard stories on NPR in the car. My mother called me to ask me "about this Java thing." Java was everywhere and going to be in everything.
In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.
That's also why Apple renamed OpenStep to Cocoa. Java was supposed to be the primary development language for Mac OS X (because Java and Cocoa go great together).
> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
Sun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
Can confirm. The dot-com era startups I was involved with all had Oracle DB on Sun hardware. Apache was common. Java was somewhat common if you could deal with its slowness. C++ was common if you could deal with memory problems or needed more speed / efficiency than Java.
The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting.
I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
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...
Another testament to how incredibly forward looking Sun Microsystems was. Truly a champion of open systems.
It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Doesn't that article contradict your statement? It gives a bunch of examples of companies supporting open source for sound business reasons, and then claims that Sun is doing stuff with unsound business motivations.
This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight.
But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java.
Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”.
Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
I think the motivation is backwards. Many employees and even executives are highly motivated by moral arguments. They want to do good in the world, and get paid for it. But to do so they have to justify it with a business case.
IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion."
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
I remember being confused by that tagline and also by Sun's later pitch: "We put the dot in dotcom"!
A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice.
Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)
Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
[dead]
Seems like just yesterday. It's also about when my daughter was born which also seems like yesterday.
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.
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.
You're talking about MIPS?
DEC Alpha processors.
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.
I think they were talking about using JavaScript to setup message queues between Java Applets and the Applets would be doing multi-media-esque things.
Some seems to be server-side, as well, which was a Netscape product long before Node.js, but I'm not sure if this was already available, then. (When was the Netscape Enterprise server launched?)
I'm also not too sure, if LiveConnect (the connection between JS and Java applets and vice versa) was already a thing, when JavaScript was announced. (I think, this came a little later.)
Quick note that JavaScript was written in ten days by Brendan Eich.
Ken Thompson built Unix over a 30 day period.
Youth - go forth and build us something cool! It might work out.
You can tell
Remember the old Bjarne Stroustrup quote: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
For sure. And, to quote the Systems Bible: Any complex working system is only the result of the growth of a simple working system. It works. It worked then, and it works now. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. Replacing it is likely impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
> He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.
FWIW... I worked with Brendan @ Mozilla for over a year. Dude expressed zero problems with my queer lifestyle that I didn't hide. I think the problem people had with Brendan was not his opposition for same-sex marriage, but his support for an organization that opposed same-sex marriage. It's a subtle distinction, but one worth making. People are complex.
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
"Capital I" internet. Love this aesthetic.
It is a proper noun, in contrast to the other internets. If there is a guy called Guy you would not call him guy.
It still annoys me whenever the public internet known as the Internet is misspelled with a lower-case i.
Hmm. Trying to remember if places I've worked at talked about "The Intranet" or "the intranet." I guess you could use "Intranet" as a proper noun if you're talking about the one in use at your company but then "intranet" if you're talking about the concept of an internet inside your company's firewall that's not connected to the Internet.
They were practically daring Microsoft to create VBScript, which it did.
And later it created JScript. Embrace and extend... this is the way.
“This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I thought JavaScript was originally called LiteScript?
"LiveScript" – all the proprietary Netscape technologies were named "Live…", as in LiveWire, LiveBridge, etc.
Would've been nice if they'd also released a decent standard library at the same time.
"30 years ago today netscape and sun killed the web"
Modern web pages are like this now: <html><one.js><two.js><three.js></html>
Standards made by accident.
Seems that most of the standards people actually use were made by accident.
And with that, the internet started to die
> 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.