He says several times that JavaScript succeeded in spite of being a bad language because it was the only choice. How come we're not all writing Java applets or Flash apps?
The number of security issues that plug-ins have had in the last two decades makes most of them non-starters nowadays, although there are still plenty of sites that use them extensively (say, Childrens' game websites like Neopets and Nick Jr.'s website) depending on the target audience.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/due-to-secu...
Javascript won for this reason.
I was thinking about the days of Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, Newgrounds, and so on, when flash cartoons and games were (for kids, at least) a huge part of internet culture, and everyone wanted to be a Flash animator. Youtube kinda killed the Flash cartoon medium, sadly. Sure, videos are simpler and don't rely on a proprietary binary blob, but there's nothing like loading up a Strong Bad email and clicking random things (or, uh, holding down tab) trying to find secrets.
I'm just interested in the topic because it's kind of neat to look back at the internet and observe its history and the changes its gone through. Just did a little wikipediaing for fun - here are when a few different websites / notable games were released:
Newgrounds: 1995
Homestarrunner: 2000
Miniclip: 2001
Armor Games: 2005
Kongregate: 2006
Fancy Pants Adventures: 2006
Desktop Tower Defense: 2007
Javascript just required that you click refresh.
Especially on 1995 technology, that mattered. Compiling Java took a while. I didn't use Flash enough to retain an impression of speed, but it sure wasn't instantaneous.
The fact that Java, ActiveX etc.. had full control of the system and causes problems ensuring security was an issue, but it is not the reason why JS beat them all.
Don't discount the power of 1) free and 2) easy to use software that is 3) not controlled by a single corporation. JS is the only web programming language that is all of these.
Yea, maybe Python or Clojure in the browser would be cool. I would argue Clojure is absolutely more difficult for a novice to learn, and Python provides what additional benefit? JS was there first.
The only reasons why plugins existed is you couldn't do these kinds of things in the DOM. JQ, and the subsequent advances in browser technology, HTML, CSS, JS - made it so you can. Also, other things being equal - programmers will choose elegance over bloat, less layers of abstraction over more. Plugin architecture became just an unnecessary layer between the programmer and the browser, after HTML/JS/CSS caught up.
JS did not become ubiquitous by accident, or because it was the only choice. There were many choices (all being pimped by big well-funded companies). JS won because it was the better than the alternatives.
Javascript, on the other hand, was omnipresent and comparatively accessible. It was the least bad option by a wide, wide margin. For a different comparison, I switched from Java applets to PHP in the early 2000s. I didn't really get into Javascript until many, many years later around 2009: before that, Javascript was mostly a way to make Flash work properly.
There was also the version issue to worry about. "Pardon me, Mr./Ms Customer/User -- would you mind terribly going and downloading and installing a 20 MB Java update on your 14.4k dialup connection before using this page?"
Nightmarish, it was.
Even stranger is how Sun, a hardware/platform company, decided making a popular platform that's hardware and platform independent would help their business. Sometimes I wonder if there was a really well thought-out plan, or people were just doing things.
Sun probably also realized that they weren't about to compete directly with mighty Microsoft on platform lockin of all things, so they played a different game.