Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

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> "Silicon Valley" is not an actor (human or organization of humans) that decided any such thing.

Oh come on, you understand full well that they're referring to the wider SV business/software development "ecosystem".

Which is absolutely to blame for javascript becoming the default language for full-stack development, and the resulting JS-ecosystem being a dysfunctional shitshow.

Most of this new JS-ecosystem was built by venture capital startups & tech giants obsessed with deploying quickly, with near-total disregard for actually building something robustly functional and sustainable.

e.g. React as a framework does not make sense in the real world. It is simply too slow on the median device.

It does, however, make sense in the world of the Venture Capital startup. Where you don't need users to be able to actually use your app/website well. You only need that app/website to exist ASAP so you can collect the next round of investment.

Oh come on yourself.

Companies including Bloomberg and Microsoft (neither in or a part of Silicon Valley), also big to small companies all over the world, built on JS once Moore’s Law and browser tech combined to make Oddpost, and then gmail, feasible.

While the Web 2.0 foundations were being laid by indie devs, Yahoo!, Google, others in and out of the valley, most valley bigcos were building “RIAs” on Java, then Flash. JS did not get some valley-wide endorsement early or all at once.

While there was no command economy leader or bureaucracy to dictate “JS got on first but it is better to replace it with [VBScript, likeliest candidate]”, Microsoft did try a two-step approach after reacting to and the reverse-engineering JS as “JScript”.

They also created VBS alongside JS, worked to promote it too (its most used sites were MS sites), but JS got on first, so MS was too late even by IE3 era, and IE3 was not competitive vs. Netscape or tied to Windows. IE4 was better than Netscape 3 or tardy, buggy 4 on Windows; and most important, it was tied. For this tying, MS was convicted in _U.S. v. Microsoft_ of abusing its OS monopoly.

Think of JS as evolution in action. A 2024-era fable about the Silly Valley cartel picking JS early or coherently may make you feel good, but it’s false.

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