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.
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!
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”.
This clearly shows how chaotic development of javascript really was.
It has always been like:
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!
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!