It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

I think we are getting a rude awakening about what is legal versus what is actually right are not always the same thing. There are some the horrible, horrible things here and the laws need updating, as opposed to us simply saying this is for a judge to decide and there is nothing else we can do.

I am ok with ditching the JavaScript name. I understand this cuts the problem entirely. However, there are other problems we have that we can't bypass so easily.

We need copyright terms to be much reduced. We need CFAA fully repealed and not replaced by anything. We need to abolish software patents. There is a lot we need to do that will likely take a century to accomplish and that's likely being too optimistic.

What we can't do is leave everything up to the judges because clearly even if we get a favorable ruling today, the precedent can be removed by another stroke of a pen.

Sounds appropriate to me.

But it doesn't mean there's much commonality - beyond superficially C-like syntax - between the languages, and certainly not between their "standard libraries" (aka the browser APIs in JavaScript's case).

Haha, or because it froze the whole browser for a few seconds upon loading. Unlike Macromedia Flash by the way.

This cramming did not have any regard for whether Java was a good solution for a given problem, or indeed whether the Java of that era could solve the problem at all. It did not matter. Java was Good. Good was Java. Java was the Future. Java was the Entire Future. Get on board or get left behind. It was made all the more infuriating for the fact that the Java of this time period was not very good at all; terrible startup, terrible performance, absolutely shitty support for anything we take for granted nowadays like GUIs or basic data structure libraries, garbage APIs shoved out the door as quickly as possible so they could check the bullet point that "yes, java did that" as quickly as possible, like Java's copy-of-a-copy of the C++ streaming (which are themselves widely considered a terrible idea and an antipattern today!).

I'm not even saying this because I'm emotional or angry about it or hate Java today. Java today is only syntactically similar to Java in the 90s. It hardly resembles it in any other way. Despite the emotional tone of some of what I'm saying, I mean this as descriptive. Things really were getting shoveled out the door with a minimum of design and no real-world testing so that the Java that they were spending so much marketing money on could be said that yes! It connected to this database! Yes! It speaks XML! Yes! It has a cross-platform GUI! These things all barely work as long as you don't subject them to a stiff breeze, but the bullet point is checked!

The original plan was for Java to simply be the browser language, because that's what the suits wanted, because probably that's what the suits were being paid to want. Anyone can look around today and see that that is not a great match for a browser language, and a scripting language was a better idea especially for the browser in the beginning. However, the suits did not care.

The engineers did, and they were able to sneak a scripting language into the browser by virtue of putting "Java" in the name, which was enough to fool the suits. If my previous emotional text still has not impressed upon you the nature of this time, consider what this indicates from a post-modern analysis perspective. Look at Java. Look at Javascript. Observe their differences. Observe how one strains to even draw any similarities between them beyond the basics you get from being a computer language. Yet simply slapping the word "Java" on the language was enough to get the suits to not ask any more questions until much, much later. That's how crazy the Java push was at the time... you could slip an entirely different scripting language in under the cover of the incredible propaganda for Java.

So while the press release will say that it was intended to glue Java applets, because that's what the suits needed to hear at that point, it really wasn't the case and frankly it was never even all that great at it. Turns out bridging the world between Java and Javascript is actually pretty difficult; in 2025 we pay the requisite memory and CPU costs without so much as blinking but in an era of 32 or 64 MEGAbyte RAM profiles it was nowhere near as casual. The reality is that what Javascript was intended to be by the actual people who created it and essentially snuck it in under the noses of the suits is exactly what it is today: The browser scripting language. I think you also had some problems like we still have today with WASM trying to move larger things back and forth between the environments, only much, much more so.

We all wish it had more than a week to cook before being shoved out the door itself, but it was still immensely more successful than Java ever could have been.

(Finally, despite my repeated use of the term "suits", I'm not a radical anti-business hippie hacker type. I understand where my paycheck comes from. I'm not intrinsically against "business people". I use the term perjoratively even so. The dotcom era was full of bullshit and they earned that perjorative fair and square.)

https://simonwillison.net

You'll still get all the strong typing without have to wait for it to run.

For example an error in a little used branch would cause an error before the branch even runs.

It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.

Edit: Seems I'm incorrect, see below

Anyone they feel like. Lawnmower gonna mow.

Why would that be the case, if not for Oracle's litigiousness?

1. Oracle is the litigious one here. My favorite example is that time they attacked a professor for publishing less-than-glowing benchmarks of their database: https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/ What's to stop them from suing anyone using the term JavaScript in a way that isn't blessed by them? That's what Deno is trying to protect against.

2. Deno is filing a petition to cancel the trademark, not claim it themselves. This would return it to the public commons.

It should be obvious from these two facts that any member of the public that uses JavaScript should support this, regardless of what they think of Deno-the-company.

In this case the trademark existing and belonging to Oracle is creating more confusion than no trademark existing, so deleting it is morally right. And because Oracle isn't actually enforcing it it is also legally right

Imho this is just the prelude to get better press. "We filed a petition to delete the JavaScript trademark" doesn't sound nearly as good as "We collected 100k signatures for a letter to Oracle and only got silence, now we formally petition the USPTO". It's also a great opportunity to find pro-bono legal council or someone who would help fund the petition

IANAL, but I don't think that wouldn't be enough to keep the trademark.

Also the petition was a "we'll ask nicely first so we can all avoid the hastle and expense of legal procedings", they are now in the process of getting the trademark invalidated, but Oracle, illogically but perhaps unsurprisingly is fighting it.

This is extremely ironic given that JavaScript was so named because people do give a damn about names so Netscape/Sun leveraged the Java success to push JS, hence they named it JAVAscript despite it having nothing to do with Java.

ECMAScript is a horrible name. It's worse than Google Bard.

Someone just wanted to share their Rust + JavaScript knowledge with people, and they got a cease and desist. It's clearly not ideal.