A brief history of JavaScript | Deno
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In 30 years, JavaScript went from being a little scripting language to one of the world's most popular. Here are key moments to show how it has evolved and where it is headed.
  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    4·
    24 hours ago

    Netscape asked Brendan Eich to develop a scripting language that looks like Java, but be object oriented rather than class based.

    I don’t understand this part. Isn’t object oriented also class based?? I mean that’s the entire reason why classes exist, to create objects. Isn’t it? How is this separated here?

    • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      4·
      23 hours ago

      To my understanding, the original meaning of object oriented is more similar to what we call the actor model today.

      In reference to the modern understanding of OO, js uses prototypal inheritance, which some consider closer to the original vision.

    • vermaterc@lemmy.ml
      2·
      23 hours ago

      Object oriented languages can be either class based or prototype based. Java is class based, JS was back then prototype based

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        1·
        23 hours ago

        Thanks, I see. I’ll research and learn more about the differences. Thought this was an writing error and didn’t research yet.

        • vermaterc@lemmy.ml
          1·
          22 hours ago

          I mean: it is a writing error, because you can’t compare “class based” to OOP, since they are just different things, but this is what is suspect was the case ;)

  • vermaterc@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 day ago

    This clearly shows how chaotic development of javascript really was.

    It has always been like:

    1. Design a language for small browser scripts
    2. People suddenly start using it somewhere else
    3. It turns out it does not fit to where people try to use it
    4. Hundreds of frameworks appear to fix this, milion standards appear, people fight for years to work out a single go-to solution
    5. Return to point 2
    • Life is Tetris@leminal.space
      2·
      6 hours ago

      I suspect writing cross-platform desktop/mobile apps in HTML/CSS/JS was another big pull in this direction.

      Many popular languages are bad, yet JS is the one with a widely-deployed OS interface written in it (WebOS).

      If free-software/open-source devs hadn’t got caught up chasing all this, there was a chance of replacing JS with other languages in the stack. HTML/CSS/your_language probably for apps initially, even making browsers support plugging in languages later. The docs say anything other than JS is not supported, so no <script type=“text/your_language”>. If only!

      • Life is Tetris@leminal.space
        1·
        20 minutes ago

        Apparently, this should be possible now (and, for apps, the result would be as “usable” as Electron) thanks to WebIDL. For example, Webkit’s code to support Javascript access of browser objects is generated from a WebIDL spec. Generating support for <your_language>'s access to Webkit’s browser objects is “just work”.

        Actually, https://tauri.app/ …

        Enough of this tangent now!