- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.
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No wonder why it’s sucks 20 balls
takes talent to suck that many balls and still be the kaka smear binding much of the web lol
The internet and browsers felt so comfortable back then. I was a kid, but I felt like I had a command center at my fingertips. Was like flying a space freighter made from scrap metal.
“Bill Gates was bitching about us changing JS all the time,” Eich later recalled of the fall of 1996.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
yes, we have a german proverb for that:
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/wie_aus_einem_Guss
a lot of things turn out much better if you think about them long enough, and then implement them all at once in a short amount of time.
Replace internet with WWW though.
Application runtimes like node.js have allowed JavaScript to break containment. Anything could be running JavaScript under the hood now. I’ve worked with FTP servers written entirely in JavaScript.
Ewwwww
Beats Django
Worth the click just to see the Pic of Netscape 2.0 opening Alta vista.
Definitely had its frustrations, but overall this was when browsing the web was a largely enjoyable experience.
And now Netscape is known as Firefox (sort of)!
You mean Seamonkey.
Netscape Navigator -> Firefox
Netscape Communicator -> SeamonkeyI never knew the difference till I just googled it, does sound familiar from way back when. I seem to recall having an email button in one of them or just fuzzy memory these days.
Waits to see how long it takes for someone to post that XKCD picture
We’re gonna need a new one for JS, it was a tiny little brick in 1995, now it’s a sprawling cancerous behemoth dragging all the other blocks down.
Which one?
Thank you!
Of course. This one might be relevant to you now: https://xkcd.com/1053/
The Internet is held together by duct tape and glue sticks.
I wish JavaScript would die already.
Every software is.
Or at least all the browsers agree to implement something nicer as a standard.
Better than whatever HTML5 is
10 days is insane
That’s what the most generous software project deadline ever looks like
Speaking of hacks, that title sucks.
I mean, sure, but the JS we write today is quite a bit different than the JS he designed.
It was also heavily influenced by a number of other languages, and borrowed tons of libraries from them. The entire number and math system is just a straightforward implementation of IEEE 754.
Yes, but all of the quirks it had back then are still there, for backwards compatibility
Yeah, but only kind of. It depends if you’re using the new syntax. Within new language constructs (like classes and modules), code runs in strict mode without having to use
. It gets rid of some of the annoying quirks.
The entire number and math system is just a straightforward implementation of IEEE 754.
Yeah, but using doubles for everything is its own downsides e.g. it’s why JSON “can’t” store 64bit integers for starters.
They did add the
BigIntclass recently, which annoyingly you can’t use with JSON because it requires specialized handling (Because of the aforementioned issue with JSON).(So you “can” store 64bit integers in JSON, the spec just says not to, so people just ignore the spec. You just then run into silent truncation issues with clients that do follow it, like browsers.)
Safe json handling requires that all properties are stringified anyway and you cast them to their correct types (because json sucks and you can never tell what someone will put in there anyway).
Yeah, I actually really don’t like JSON. It looks simple but actually isn’t, that’s a bad combo.
CBOR is much nicer, but annoyingly they made their human readable debug version of it similar enough to JSON that people assume it’s just a binary form of JSON, it isn’t.
Yeah, I completely agree. It’s straightforward, but it’s got a lot of downsides. Everything always takes eight bytes. Even if you’re just storing 0 or 1.
It makes handling numbers a lot simpler in most cases, though, and simplicity was the goal of JavaScript. I just wish there was a better solution than typed arrays.
In case you didn’t know, the original ‘Mozilla Suite’ (the browser/HTML composer/Mail client) is still apparently being developed! I’m sure it’s behind a lot of modern standards, but I love the idea it’s being kept alive…
It looks like it used modern Firefox and Thunderbird code under the hood, so it should be good on standards!
Neat – I just set it up, got my gmail going in the Mail app and it works.
uBlock Origin isn’t officially supported any more as it’s considered ‘legacy browser’, but I found a working XPI here and it even seems to block Youtube ads. Wow.
…though my self-hosted Nextcloud login page doesn’t seem to work with it. If it isn’t a known issue I’ll file a bug ticket with them.
So surreal, being able to run Mozilla (now ‘Seamonkey’) on Windows 11 in 2025.
ECMAScript was such a mistake.
aka Nutscrape
It beats Microsoft Testicle Exploder.
I wasn’t familiar with those two products so I Gurgled them and the search results were… interesting.
Concepts from Scheme? You sure about that?
Yep. JavaScript is basically a LISP wearing a Java trenchcoat. Functions are first class citizens and can be passed around just like variables. Object orientation is weird and bolted on as an afterthought.
In case you’re wondering just how much functional programming is possible in JS, I recommend reading this: https://mostly-adequate.gitbook.io/mostly-adequate-guide/
when you want Scheme but your boss wants Java
