this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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A brief history of JavaScript (deno.com)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days 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!