Raising Perl awareness on Tiobe + Wikipedia, etc.

Mallory van Achterberg stommepoes at stommepoes.nl
Thu Mar 21 08:08:19 GMT 2013


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 01:00:04PM +0800, AJ Dhaliwal wrote:
> AFAIK JS was first created to manipulate the HTML DOM. Then
> Microsoft invented AJAX and that is what really pushed JS into the
> limelight. So JS had a very limited defined role as scripting
> language in its beginning. Maybe "JUST a scripting language" is not
> too far off a description.

Brenden Eich wrote the story of how it came to be and it's intersting
enough. It was a Self-y and Scheme-y beginning that within the "10
days" it was written, was forced to be "like Java", cause that was
the hip thing.
Of course since he let his old blog break I can't find it, but there
is further comment on there.[1]

True, it wasn't like Perl's attempt to be a better bash/sed/awk/C/
whatever. More of a easy Java for those nephews who can write HTML.

However Javascript, while starting out lacking a lot, today has filled
in many of the gaps. It never fixed its basic retardation, but
libraries exist to fix it.

There's some excellent Javascript (and Ruby) derp-demonstration in
the WAT video: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

> I just remembered that Mozilla uses JS for their chrome so I may
> have just invalidated my first sentence. It will take too much
> trouble to change it so better just leave it there.Bran

Mozilla never lost their love affair with Javascript and are one of
the main developers, working on Harmony right now. It was integral to
XUL (of which there is only, as there is no Dana) and yeah, the
Firefox OS has parts (or all of it?) built entirely out of HTML, CSS
and Javascript. Or so I heard in a rumourz on teh interwebs.

-Mallory
[1] https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/


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