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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Ok, but what did people actually think about it? These are just quotes from high-up business people, they're trained to never say anything negative.

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Yeah, this is all marketing/partnership fluff. I'd be much more interested in seeing flame wars from Usenet. :) I was programming back then but I don't remember what the sentiment was at the time. I just remember Microsoft insisting on calling it "JScript" or "ActiveScript" or something because they didn't want to give Java any mindshare over ActiveX.

Yep. IE went so far as to add support for VBScript (a language based on visual basic) to compete.

I now wish there'd be actual Python on the web.

I haven't tested it and it might not work in a recent IE, but at least at the past IE used ActiveScript so any ActiveScript language could be used. Python can be installed as an ActiveScript engine and used via IE.

The same applies with other languages too (e.g. Perl, Ruby, etc).

Back then, most all the Javascript you ever saw was client-side form validation. Single-page-apps were still a long way off, so all web apps were built in form submission style: the user fills out some form data, it gets sent to the server, the server tells them they filled it out wrong and re-presents the form to the user. You could make that a little more user-friendly by having Javascript validate the form _before_ the users submitted it: but you had to validate it again on the server side because the user might have Javascript turned off, or might be a hacker. That meant that, for most web developers, Javascript just meant extra work: you had to duplicate your form-validation logic in a very finicky, untestable, untyped programming language. Browser makers were working on adding some flashier stuff like drop-down menus and image rollovers, but they didn’t work across different browsers (all both of them), so even the few people who did know how to use the extensions were encouraged not to. It seemed like everybody who could avoid Javascript did - I can’t really for the life of me understand how the early Javascript developers actually got anything done in it. It was a really painful way to develop software until maybe ten years ago.

It was not well liked.

The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation.

Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.

This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.

With TypeScript and async/await papering over its greatest sins and inconveniences, it's not half bad.

Not only that, for years afterwards the techie crowd and equivalent of places like HN (I suppose I am mostly talking about slashdot) had a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, etc.

I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like gmail in 2004 were a turning point.

>a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content,

I still feel like this.

Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new normal.

My love of a paycheck drives me to give deference to the new normal. Meanwhile real desktop programs are still way more pleasant to use and way more respectful of my system resources, and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

> and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

I dunno, there are some pretty egregious examples of this being false though. gmail is one such example. I remember using webmail in the days where every action was a full page load -- and we had slower connections then too, which made it hurt even more. Then gmail came out and blew everybody away with its response times. A well thought out AJAX solution could give you minimal load times for data. The issue lately is when the JS code is too big, not well tuned, and gives the equivalent of several 90s-era-website-full-pageloads worth of data with every action. That is to say a lot of websites aren't as lean as they could be.

I'm not a web focused person so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, this is my outsider's perspective.

“AJAX” when it was mostly grabbing chunks of HTML to insert or otherwise not doing much but “grab, render” was sometimes faster. Not so much these days.

RIP progressive enhancement

It was two things around 2004-5: 1) people using GWT to make SPAs and 2) the ability to lazy load content through XMLHttpRequest.

GWT was essentially what typescript is today but java and it handled most of the nasty DOM related stuff and browser incompatibilities.

I wouldn’t say it was unliked. It enabled image rollovers and people _loved_ those.

People liked the rollovers, not javascript. You'd see people try doing them in flash, shockwave, as java applets, activex controls, and I'm probably missing a few.

If they were done in javascript, the code was heavily cargo-culted and cut and paste.

I remember doing a tutorial from a computer magazine in the 90s. The article was presenting the basic features like for, while, if... So I thought wow, now I can program stuff in the web browser. The tutorial was then starting with hands-on code, like

    document.writeln("Hello world!");

Seems quite a natural thing to do when coming from other languages. But after playing around with it for an afternoon, I came to the conclusion: that's too difficult, I rather spend my time on something else. (If I remember correctly, at that time I was comfortable with Basic and had a little exposure to C++ and Pascal)

As far as I can remember, people didn't really think much about it, after all without all the modern libraries the language was useless, and browsers were only marginally able to run Active-X and Java stuff anyway so people weren't even into the mindset that "this new language could be used to write web apps".

To me as a regular user, JavaScript was only there to do annoying popups at the start.

Funny how some things never change...

it was something to do very simple things to enhance websites usability. I don't really remember anyone particularly liking it. It was something you tended to learn as little of in a very reluctant way.

More exciting was things like Java applets or Flash. I did a bunch of stuff with Java applets and was quite impressed in 95-96 when java first came out. I wrote some simple 2d games (falling block puzzle games) which got semi popular. No way to do that in the js world at the time.

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