Hacker News Reader

Comment by arisAlexis | Hacker News Reader

Seems like javascript is picked up by giants (microsoft build its IDE) facebook (React?) Google (angular) so I guess you cant compare it with VB unlesss I missed something in the 90s

View on HN

Oh boy did you miss something in the 90s! It was call active pages (or some bullshit, I have tried to block it from my memory) and it made Internet Explorer the king of browsers and still locks in a lot of government agencies and business from upgrading their infrastructure, because they don't want to lose or have to pay to redevelop "critical" applications to their daily work.

ActiveX?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX

No, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

Kind of related, it was a COM control you could stretch over your whole desktop, that received push notifications.

Also, I believe it was TOTALLY secure.

Edit: Dang it, I missed where they said "and it made ie the king of browsers." -- Yes, ActiveX

I was 8 when Active Desktop came out -- I used it to put Neopets on the desktop of my computer.

I think they mean Active Server Pages, ie. classical ASP, which you could program using Visual Basic?

ASP was programmed using VBScript (and actually extensible - it used Active Scripting, so you could also do JS, and third parties added support for e.g. Perl). And, since it was server-side tech, and very low-level at that, it didn't care what browser rendered the output.

I think this was a reference to ActiveX. Although most ActiveX controls weren't written in VB, either, even though you could do it - the resulting control was just too large to download, because you had to include ~2 Mb of VB runtime (remember, we're talking about the time back when dialup was still incredibly common - and 2 Mb takes 5 minutes to download on 56k). Mostly it was done in VC++ with ATL.

Meh. Microsoft built a text editor with it and only because it was the simplest choice to have finally a os-independent editor (maybe now they would have go for .net core if they had a good cross-ui library). Facebook and Google had to use it because you are talking about framework for the web, and sadly our browsers support directly only javascript as scripting language... they have not chosen it, they were forced to use it.

in the 90s there was microsoft...

outside of internety places, big iron and academia, that was it. 'must be compatible with windows' started appearing in 'request for proposal' specs.

what microsoft pushed got massive mind share.

I think you might be missing the distinction in the above post. Node.JS != Javascript.

What? Node.JS is Javascript. JS at the end of the name stands for Javascript!

You beat me to it. I was going to write:

Node.JS === Javascript

...except for the whole sync/async (libuv) thing. And the bits they added on top of V8, like Buffers.

Maybe Javascript == Node.JS then?

many comments here, still my argument that there were no major projects and IT giants building important stuff with VB holds. Downvotes or not, you can't compare these two languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com