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A Firefox zero-day vulnerabilityA Firefox zero-day vulnerabilityPosted Oct 27, 2010 21:06 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: A Firefox zero-day vulnerability by brugolsky Parent article: A Firefox zero-day vulnerability
The W3C didn't invent Javascript – Netscape did. When Javascript first came out, the W3C bigwigs were absolutely horrified. Robert Cailliau called it »the only programming language worse than C«. Tim Berners-Lee was, to put it kindly, unenthusiastic about client-side programming in Web pages in the first place.
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Brendan Eich Posted Oct 27, 2010 23:19 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
More specifically Brendan Eich. Here's a recent example of him defending himself
http://jwz.livejournal.com/1307198.html?thread=23007038#t...
I'm glad nobody is building entire platforms on top of any languages /I/ hacked together in less than fortnight, because lack of natural overflow from integers into BigNums is nothing compared to what you'd be stuck with if it was all on my shoulders.
Brendan Eich Posted Oct 28, 2010 0:39 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I think the name really says it all already. »Hey, let's call the thing JavaScript – Java is the big thing now and we'll just hang on to that for the ride! Who cares if the language is nothing like real Java.« If they'd called their browser »Javigator« it might even still be there.
Brendan Eich Posted Oct 28, 2010 14:34 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
You think you are joking, don't you?
http://news.cnet.com/Netscape-sharpens-Javagator-plans/21...
(Date: December 1997)
Gerv
Javagator Posted Oct 28, 2010 18:58 UTC (Thu) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
Thanks for making me smile ;-)
Brendan Eich Posted Oct 31, 2010 23:19 UTC (Sun) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Just that Brendan was AFAIK not naming it this (he called it "Mocha", I think) and was quite unhappy at first with the "JavaScript" name Netscape marketing did put on it - but then I only know all that from hearsay...
A Firefox zero-day vulnerability Posted Oct 28, 2010 22:33 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28) [Link]
I'm aware of the history, which makes it all the worse, since plenty of folks understood that it was a terrible hack, and yet it was enshrined as a de facto standard anyway, when the web was young. Essentially zero thought given to document semantics, security, location transparency, RTT latency, ..., despite the history of 3270, X11, NeWS, LISP machines, etc.
So now we have huge application stacks built on a wildly divergent array of technologies that each should have received at best a middling grade on a two-week-long undergraduate CS assignment and then gone into the trash bin.
Sometimes worse really is just plain worse. :-/
-Bill
A Firefox zero-day vulnerability Posted Oct 28, 2010 23:09 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Yes, but at the time the only viable alternative would have been VBscript (or something similar out of Microsoft), so maybe we can count ourselves lucky after all.
A Firefox zero-day vulnerability Posted Oct 28, 2010 23:21 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
remember that it's primary competition at the early stages was Active X
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