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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Nothing technically wrong with Java and JS of course, but this terrible PR piece which desperately tries to pitch Java as an integral part of the web, going even as far as naming an innocent scripting language for web browsers JAVAscript truly demonstrates that the mid-to-end-90's were the dark age of computing (at least the corporate side).

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It was actually a fairly exciting time...? OOP had really just broken into the mainstream (with Java, the first OOP to really take off) and would go on to become ubiquitous, spawning tons of little new languages (including Python). There were multiple vendors pushing VB-like products, some arguably better than MS itself, giving high levels of productivity (who some argue have never been achieved since). PCs had dramatically democratized access, now anyone could build their own tools without having to beg for server time, and sysadmin on Windows was so loose that one could typically get away with anything (yes, virus bad etc etc, but it was still a fun ride). Desktops had just become a standard feature of every white-collar job and everyone was busy trying to make sense of them; the smart folks made millions selling line-of-business apps. And then the internet arrived and everything had to be re-done as web-based (hello Perl and ASP), plus tons of intranet portals that were horrible to use but fun to make, so to speak.

Maybe it's because I was 20 back then, but there was a sense of fun and exploration in most computing that is somewhat missing in this age of smart-everything, JS-everywhere, and total surveillance.

I agree with you, it really was exciting. It was almost like the opposite of the "Everything is awesome and no one is happy" time we're living in now?

Everything was awful, and everyone was happy. Remember being super excited the first time you saw an animated GIF!? Or you could mouse-over a picture and there would be a popup that said "hey don't touch my face"! Everything was slow and crashed all the time, but it was new and really interesting and fun. People were just figuring things out, and the new stuff that was coming out was amazing at the time. Everything was getting faster and better, but damn, it was hard to get anything done.

I literally remember the day in my school library when I found out framesets were a thing and it blew my mind that this part of the webpage could move independently from that part. And no one even uses framesets anymore.

And you're right - nowadays we can stream video, audio, games, compile and run code from numerous languages right in the browser, and the web has more interesting and rich content than ever, but everyone is mad because that means the web has moved beyond their childhoods and gotten complicated with time.

> everyone is mad because that means the web has moved beyond their childhoods

There is a bit of that, but there is also a realization that we probably did not really need most of these "advancements".

Arguably, the web doesn't need to be anything but a simulation of paper documents connected with hyperlinks, but if it had stayed that way, the world would have been denied a great deal of creative and cultural expression in other media (including code.) For all its faults, both in the language and the ways that it's been implemented, Javascript on the web launched a revolution in writing and publishing code akin to what the Gutenberg press did for text.

> Everything was awful, and everyone was happy.

Totally this!

Not sure if times were actually different, or it's just that I was young then...

Ok granted, it was not all bad :) For me the mid-90's were traumatic because it was a transition from Amiga to PC (just before Win95 arrived), which was like being thrown from a bright Star Trek future back into the stone age. Also the dream of building applications from reusable components led to horrors like CORBA, COM and DDE.

Java is like 3-4 years older than Python.

You may have that backwards. The first releases of Python happened in the early 90's.

Ah - that's what I meant to post.

Python actually was first released in 1991, as James Gosling and friends had just started working on Java, but I can't even remember if python 1.x had classes at all.

Java was everywhere pretty much as soon as it landed in 1995, because SUN pushed it like crazy and loads of shops were actually looking for something better than C/C++ for a large number of apps. By the time Python 2.0 was released in 2000, OOP was pretty much a requirement for anything, and I'm pretty sure that had classes. Python didn't reach popularity in the mainstream until the late '00s anyway.

Python had objects in Python 1.4, according to documentation released on 25 October 1996. Python.org doesn't have anything older than that on their site.

Java was the most buzzwordy thing imaginable back then. Everything was Java Java Java

“By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/01/12/by-installing-java...

Well I don't know if you are joking, but back then it was the other way around. They put Java into JavaScript to pitch JavaScript... I guess it worked almost too good...

In ye olden dayes, building big, interactive experiences on the web wasn't possible without Java (or ActiveX). Even the first iteration of JavaScript couldn't interact with the live DOM and CSS hadn't come into being yet. It was a sincerely held belief by technology professionals (myself included) that a desktop UI platform was the only way to deliver rich experiences over the internet. And honestly it may have to come to pass if the early versions of Swing weren't so slow and ugly.

webASSEMBLY is not much better name.

Haha indeed, it could be worse though: JavaAssembly ;)

http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM

Maybe we get WASM CPUs in the future, haha.

Well, HTML5 super computers are the future.

Well, the next regularly scheduled Apple ISA switch is expected to be finished no later than 2035...

Why wait when you can bring back Jazelle for WebAssembly?

Eh, the thing is until you said that it never occurred to me. However before I started to ever really code in the web world I was always wondering if javascript was really like a semi-java hack on the web or whatever.

Everyone knows that we are so far removed from assembly that it creates zero confusion in reality.. javascript caused real confusion.

I allways though the name was an intended pun.

My preference is still for something akin to the original LiveScript or HyperScript.

For a starter, having no integer types and non-symmetric comparison operators looks technically wrong to me.

I spent the late 80s working in XBase, which also had a single numeric type, though you could enforce the desired precision by saving numbers in tables.

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