I was hired at Netscape in April 1995
Netscape had already launched it's 1.0
Mosaic killer. If you remember, Mosaic was
the big, I think Mosaic was the big
browser until Netscape took over. So when
I came to Netscape they'd been going for
about a year. I actually had an option to
go in at the beginning, I passed it up.
But I went in, in time to do what I was
tempted to do, which is a programming
language for HTML for web designers and
programmers to use, embedded directly in
the webpage. Not something that was, like,
coming along at the time called Java,
which was more of a professional's
language, where you would write real code
with type declarations and you'd have to
write that code in a way that compiled. I
was writing something, JavaScript that
could be used by people who didn't know
what a compiler was. They were just gonna
load it, it was like basic. And that was
really the pitch that we would make, two
languages, not one in August the
Microsoft's visual basic for C++, so
JavaScript for java. Bill Joy of Sun
actually liked that idea and agreed with
and he was the guy that signed the
trademark license by which what I had
created became JavaScript. The name is a
total lie. It's not really related to
Java, so much as to its common ancestors C
in Syntax. And to the extent that we made
it easy to use, and something you could
copy paste program, or start small from
scripts, and grow to programs. Javascript
has succeeded massively. It was also an
incredible rush job, so there were
mistakes in it and something that I think
is important about it, is that I knew
there would be mistakes, and there would
be gaps. So I made it very malleable as a
language. And that has enabled developers
make it be what they want it to be, to
project their own style of not just API,
but almost language pattern on it. And
create their own innovation networks to
Eric Von Hippel's phrase, or innovation
tool kits on top of it. So, it's not a
language that tries to restrict you to one
paradigm, it's a, a multi-paradigm
language. ≫> I mean there's all
these things where our language comes out
and immediately trips and falls and you
have to sort of, it's okay. ≫> Mm.
Hm. ≫> the second time. But there
wasn't really a trip and fall in
Javascript. Why? ≫> So, you could
say that it hasn't been a version two and
that's true, cause I've tried to work on
what might be a big version two, that was
called the fourth edition, and that
failed. There has been evolution. The web
is all about evolution. People don't quite
see this while you're in the midst of it
because it's micro evolution. But web
pages from the'90's don't all render
properly these days. They don't all work
right and a lot of them are lost and only
available through webarchive.org.
Javascript had enough at the beginning,
enough good parts to use Crawford's phrase
or enough genetic material from other
languages. You know, first class functions
prototypical inheritance from self. The
inheritance of first class functions from
scheme is really kind of a fraud because
scheme is different in many ways and I
couldn't make those, differences manifest.
I, I couldn't do the scheme thing in
Javascript. I was under these marching
orders to make it look like Java. I had
ten days to prototype it. So scheme was
more of a spiritual than an actual
influence. But first class functions are
very powerful, and they, fit with an event
handling, sort of, programming model. I
was inspired by Atkinson's Hypercard. So
that's why you see on click in JavaScript.
Hypercard had this pattern for event
handlers called on, you know, on page,
down or whatever. So. Javascript had
enough good at the beginning to survive.
Now, if you think back though to the mid
90's, Javascript was cursed, because it
was mainly used for annoyances like little
scrolling messages and the status bar at
the bottom of your browser or flashing
images or things that popped up windows
massively. We could have put in controls
for those and we should have. Eventually
browsers Fi refox kind of championed this,
lead this automatic suppression of
annoyances that made it all much better.
And with Moore's Law compounding and with
Javascript getting some evolutionary
improvements in the standards process, it
became really quite fast enough and good
enough in 2004 and five to get the Web 2.0
revolution that was, I think, tied in with
Firefox's retaking market share from IE,
and developers realizing that there was a
client side to the programming stack that
could be expressive and powerful, and
could be fast enough thanks to faster
computers, mainly. ≫> You must've
had some training, some kind of. ≫ Oh,
I've done a lot of. ≫> Set of
experiences. ≫> Yeah. ≫> Thank
kind of got to the point where you could
pull from scheme, and.>> Mm. Hm.
I've implemented a, I was sort of a
language buff when I first entered
computer science. I was a math-physics
major originally, and it ended up
math-computer science when I finally got
my undergraduate degree. So, I was
programming formal language theory applied
to recognizing languages, [inaudible]
analysis, Parsers, automatically
constructed parsers from grammar. I love
that stuff because it was all very pretty
and clean theoretically and it's still is,
it hasn't changed a lot. There's been only
one or two innovations since my time in
the university in the early 80's. So what,
what that gave me was the ability to
quickly knock out, you know sort of a
language interpreter. I could do the, the
parser and the scanner, I could generate
bytecode because Netscape wanted to do a
server side embedding in JavaScript, even
though it could have been three walker or
something that interpreted parts for you.
I mad a bytecode, for it and it was an
internal bytecode, not the Java bytecode
that's become a handicap for Java, I
think. And I knocked all that out really
quickly because I had done it before. I
done it at Silicon Graphics, the field of
network monitoring tools to capture
packets based on expressions over fields
of the various pr otocol headers. I've
done it for fun, just to make my own
languages. And finally, I got to do it
really quickly. The, the speed was an
issue for me. It was partly, we were all
feeling like Microsoft was gonna come
after Netscape because they had tried to
buy Netscape in late '94 for too little
money. I, I'd heard about this, in this
before my time at Netscape. But we also
were in a weird game period with respect
to Java. Because, even at Netscape, some
people thought, well, if we have Java, do
we really need a second language? They
didn't see the benefit of the Visual Basic
companion language for a much larger
cohort of programmers or amateurs,
designers, beginners. To, to write Java is
to write C++ for the Microsoft platform,
that they took a lot of education and
greater pay. It was a higher priced
proposition to get people gluing
components together and designing pages
and filling gaps using JavaScript as they
did in Basic, in Visual Basic and
Microsoft Windows was cheaper and
wider-spread. It also enabled this, user
innovation tool kit approach, to use Von
Hibbel's phrase again, because Javascript
was malleable, because there were so many
web designers, he would see different
schools of thought on how to use it emerge
and this has become quite clear over the
last ten years with the various Javascript
libraries. And I think that's actually an
advantage, as I said earlier, to
Javascript, that we're not telling you,
here's the one way to write it, here's the
one true object oriented paradigm, here's
the only way you should ever make a usable
extraction. It's not umixed, right? It's
hard for beginners. People reinvent
certain wheels, and make mistakes doing
it, or don't have, like having to acquire
a library. But you see jQuery, probably
why, because it gives people this very,
sweet, query and do paradigm. And, and
again it's not mandatory with Javascript,
but a lot of people learn that, and they
think that is Javascript. They think
jQuery is a language, or they think, you
know, jQuery is the tail that wagged the
dog. Jquery is great and John Resig used
to work with us at Mozilla, and, but there
are so many good libraries out there now.
And they're shrinking and becoming more
compositional, which is a good trend. So,
Javascript by being maleable, and sort of
fostering user innovation, I think has,
played a unique role. If I had done
something more rigid, I think it, are
greater when it failed. ≫> I, I just
can't imagine how you would have escaped
from the [inaudible] pattern of C++.
≫> Partly I had to because if I'd
done classes in Javascript back in those
ten days in May in 1995. I think I would
have been told, this is too much like
Java, you're competing with Java, you
know, somebody at Sun would have yelled at
Bill Joy more than they did, and they
might have killed the deal. So, I was
definitely not only under time constraint
but under marketing orders. Make it look
like Java, but don't make it to big for
its bridges. It's just this sort of silly
little brother language, right? The
sidekick to Java. ≫> But then you
put in it's primitives. ≫> I snuck
some stuff in, yeah. ≫> You put some
primitives, you know, like closures and
all those other things that. ≫> huh.
≫> That is like, you can build what
you want. . ≫> Yes, and that. Kind
of went under the radar for a lot of
people. It wasn't all even always there in
a good working order in the first release.
But over the next few years it became not
only well known, I would say more
standardized than well known. Over the
next ten years it became evangelized like
Crawford's [inaudible] of the closure
pattern and good uses you can make with
closures. So people find the malleability
and the expressionist and the power
compelling enough that some people
actually resist any version two. They say,
I don't want you to add cliches or common
special forms for patterns that I'm more
happy writing myself or acquiring at the
library myself. ≫> You, you've
created an abstraction that implement ers
can do crazy things. ≫> Mm-hm.
≫> Where people can rethink what the
interrupters are supposed to do. ≫>
They can. ≫> And they can just say,
okay, here comes V8 and it's [inaudible],
a lot of things differently right?
≫> Optimizations that haven't been
tried. I would, I knew about these
optimizations because I had studied small
talked in self. But nobody gotten the time
and money. Google was maybe first. There
were other efforts going in parallel and
Apple and Mozilla have kept up as best
they can, but V8 deserves a lot of credit
for pushing this forward. It wasn't quite
as first on the scene as they claim
because they all came together in 2008.
But it has been very helpful and it has
shown people what can be done. What's
interesting to me is that you then go and
put different, more intensive workloads on
the language and you see there's a new VA
that should come out of somewhere. It may
not come out of Google because they may
have tired of launching JavaScript. In
fact, I believe DART is a response to
that, by the principals who did VA. They
want to do a language where they don't
have to worry about all this crazy
compatibility. It may not succeed and it
also doesn't give Java script the next
level of performance but I. I believe that
level is there, and it's still improving
in performance much more dramatically than
a language like Java, where the gains are
percents or fractions of percent on the
center of benchmarks. But a lot of HTML5
development now, "HTML5" Javascript, CSS,
Web ADI's beyond what's in HTML5, is
taking off, you're seeing like, Zynga
doing HTML5 only games. It's really coming
faster than some thought, and I talked to
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson of Union
Square in New York, he said yes, it's
here. He thought it would take years,
it's, we've turned that corner. And so you
call it HTML5, what it really means is
it's the web stack, it's the same stack
you use to right web pages and post to web
apps you can write apps that run in your
device. Apps that are m aybe hosted, maybe
offline. Maybe the line is blurred so that
you can associate them with a URL, but can
also take them on the plane without any
fear that you're going to lose anything by
disconnecting from the internet.