JavaScript was created in 10 days in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, then working at Netscape and now of Mozilla.
In 1996 – 1997 JavaScript was taken to ECMA to carve out a standard specification, which other browser vendors could then implement based on the work done at Netscape. The work done over this period of time eventually led to the official release of ECMA-262 Ed.1: ECMAScript is the name of the official standard, with JavaScript being the most well known of the implementations.
ActionScript 3 is another well-known implementation of ECMAScript, with extensions (see below).
The standards process continued in cycles, with releases of ECMAScript 2 in 1998 and ECMAScript 3 in 1999, which is the baseline for modern day JavaScript. The “JS2” or “original ES4” work led by Waldemar Horwat (then of Netscape, now at Google) started in 2000 and at first, Microsoft seemed to participate and even implemented some of the proposals in their JScript.net language.
Over time it was clear though that Microsoft had no intention of cooperating or implementing proper JS in IE, even though they had no competing proposal and they had a partial (and diverged at this point) implementation on the .NET server side. So by 2003 the JS2/original-ES4 work was mothballed.
The next major event was in 2005, with two major happenings in JavaScript’s history. First, Brendan Eich and Mozilla rejoined Ecma as a not-for-profit member and work started on E4X, ECMA-357, which came from ex-Microsoft employees at BEA (originally acquired as Crossgain). This led to working jointly with Macromedia, who were implementing E4X in ActionScript 3(ActionScript 3 was a fork of Waldemar’s JS2/original-ES4 work).
So, along with Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe), work restarted on ECMAScript 4 with the goal of standardizing what was in AS3 and implementing it in SpiderMonkey. To this end, Adobe released the “AVM2”, code named Tamarin, as an open source project. But Tamarin and AS3 were too different from web JavaScript to converge, as was realized by the parties in 2007 and 2008.
Alas, there was still turmoil between the various players; Doug Crockford — then at Yahoo! — joined forces with Microsoft in 2007 to oppose ECMAScript 4, which led to the ECMAScript 3.1 effort.
While all of this was happening the open source and developer communities set to work to revolutionize what could be done with JavaScript. This community effort was sparked in 2005 when Jesse James Garrett released a white paper in which he coined the term Ajax, and described a set of technologies, of which JavaScript was the backbone, used to create web applications where data can be loaded in the background, avoiding the need for full page reloads and resulting in more dynamic applications.
This resulted in a renaissance period of JavaScript usage spearheaded by open source libraries and the communities that formed around them, with libraries such as Prototype, jQuery, Dojo and Mootools and others being released.
In July of 2008 the disparate parties on either side came together in Oslo. This led to the eventual agreement in early 2009 to rename ECMAScript 3.1 to ECMAScript 5 and drive the language forward using an agenda that is known as Harmony.
All of this then brings us to today, with JavaScript entering a completely new and exciting cycle of evolution, innovation and standardisation, with new developments such as the Nodejs platform, allowing us to use JavaScript on the server-side, and HTML5 APIs to control user media, open up web sockets for always-on communication, get data on geographical location and device features such as accelerometer, and more.
Finally!!!!!!!! A rant to computer “experts” and “engineers”. Pardon my french. Not directed at Eric who i know is just as frustrated with this s**t as I am. this comment NSFW.
You need to fix these g*d d**m bugs with computer code. Some of them are DECADES OLD. And its clear no one is fixing them. The majority of us only use computers because they are there and we have no choice. WE ARE NOT EXPERTS AT COMPUTING AND DON’T WANT TO BE. We have our own s**t to deal with. Why do we put up with yours?
Fix these stupid things instead of adding new “features” we will never use because we are wasting time with your g*d d**m work arounds that don’t work.
Cookies and caches have been a pain the a** since I started using the net back in the early 1990’s. WHY ARE THEY STILL PROBLEMS 20-25 years later????? FIX THEM!!!!! or get rid of them……
Make it so computers are appliances like my refrigerator or garage door opener. Why do we need to be IT people to use these things? You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but we have to be experts to surf simple websites?
What finally worked for me to get firefox (on a mac) to work again.
Went to preferences under the firefox menu, picked privacy, in the privacy section pick history and put a check in the clear history when firefox closes, there will be a settings box to the right of that. In that box put a check in the cache box. You may what to uncheck the active logins so it doesn’t log you out of all the websites your logged into. Then click the ok button. Then restart firefox
May have to do it a couple times before it finally works. It seems to change on its own, which isn’t a good sign when it comes to privacy hmmmmmm.
The software people are off breaking things that worked decades ago.
The web text box worked 20 years ago but somehow in the last year or so it is getting broken across platforms. Random cursor jumps. Backspace jumps to a random spot. Sometimes typing or pasting stops working. Have to click out and back in again. Just all sorts of annoying as *&%! stuff. And it doesn’t get fixed. Instead it goes and infects another platform. I feel like I am using an old multiuser system that doesn’t properly accept the terminal I’m using. At least that could be fixed by a clever user. Damn web text boxes have no settings to tweak.
As an end user we shouldn’t have to know that cookies and cache are! And yet we have too. I remember having something not work on a website back in 1994 or so. The answer from IT empty your cache. My what? I say, they walk me through it. My next question, why doesn’t it clear itself, its software, not some crud you have to empty out of it and throw in the trash can? Some lame non answer answer. And 22 years or so later, still this same sh*t. The question still is: Why can’t it empty itself, its software, it probably is a couple of lines of code. and it would never bother people again. WHY WHY WHY
The cache is stuff saved to your harddrive locally so it doesn’t have to fetch it from the network again. This makes the page load faster. However when something goes screwy you can’t see any changes made on the site because it’s loading from your own HD.
There are often browser settings to clear it at shut down or limit its size to zero or something very small. It’s working as designed.
If it was “working” as designed, I wouldn’t know about it. But I do because its getting in the way and breaking.
It should empty itself, but only does it you go in all those little settings boxes and tell it too when it craps out. Something an end user shouldn’t have to do. It should be the default. Ease of use and reliability for the end user should ALWAYS be the default.
That is my biggest beef with computers in general. It should conform to me, not the other way around. We conform to all of its little defects, bugs and junk.
I don’t know why people tolerate it. Any other industry this level of unreliability would never be tolerated. Would you tolerate your garage door opener if it only opened the door half the time? Of course you wouldn’t. You would rip that piece of crap out. But yet people tolerate how often computers are broken or nearly so.
And we are going to allow computers to drive for us? That is insane at this point!!!!
So…..what “broke” in me that has had Ff very briefly disappearing so I see the desktop for a fraction of a second and then it’s back? Been going on for the last 4 days or so.
I wrote my first program in ’68 before most everybody here was even a gleam in their mama’s eye. I didn’t particularly like doing it so I got on another horse.
Should everybody who drives a car have to be a mechanic? It’s the equivalent of having a plumbers license to take a shower. Fuck that.
It’s Javascript.
A shite stateless language that some idiot (likely a woman… Explained below) thought was great because it made all sorts of client-side (your browser – sends the load to the client) interactivity.
LOTS and LOTS of “responsiveness” for “engagement” of the viewer.
Hence, I think a woman. She values appearance and DooDads over actual functionality.
Tech details: Until the most recent Chrome version or so, and still in every other browser, Javascript is single-threaded. That means ONE core runs everything, and if an instruction has an issue, you’re jammed up until that wait or error is resolved. Errors don’t necessarily GET resolved – think of DOS and when things simply froze. Windows 3.1 was the same deal, if it stalled, the entire system died.
But it’s “pretty” and “interactive” (think like a child or even infant, it must make noise so he/she feels “empowered.” Same thing with these infants of the mind.)
Had a rant, but it’s not needed.
Developers are ego-driven. Clovers in their own way.
Think Tom Cruise from “Top Gun.” Except not as competent.
Gary North says website developers are not necessarily ego-driven, but laaaaazy. Do whatever is easier for themselves and screw the end-user. If corporate management were more aware (????) they would not let them get away w/it. The customer is supposed to be more important.
Corporate doesn’t care, either.
It’s why they work so hard to discourage competition – we got your money, and you don’t really have any other choices anyway…
Compare our friend Eric here with Car and Driver; who is doing better? Who is working harder to stay in one place?
Best example I have, it’s an outright CRIME.
Guy at ADP with an unpronounceable name, he came in as a developer/contractor. WORST defect list of ANY developer in the group. NOTHING worked on the first try.
Additionally, he was ALWAYS “Code Complete” within the first week of the cycle. He stubbed out every method… To give an example:
Action1 () {
return 0;
}
That was EVERYTHING he had to write. So he “made his deadline” and then had the highest defect close rate.
They brought him on as an employee, then promoted him, then promoted him again… All in about 2 years (had to break the rules for it to happen.)
Management didn’t care. He “motivated” people to get their coding done. He “managed” development and deployment. He spent all day looking at p0rn online, according to the IT department… But he was second in command in about 9 months. REALLY. Impressive.
Then he started destroying things, but it was a bit too late to get rid of him. I left before I found out the extent of the cancer, but – he was instrumental in my decision. Someone tells you that the big boss is in a conference with this guy, and this guy is arranging work between you and another guy NOT EVEN ON YOUR TEAM… Same work, mind – but Test A will pass, so give it to Mr. X, and Test B will fail, so have Jean do that one…
All they care about is getting something delivered by the date, throw it over the wall, it’s someone else’s problem then. E.G., 5 week development & test cycle, if it takes them 4 weeks 4 days to deliver, well, THEY were on time, if only QA would do their job! QA is the reason it didn’t go to PROD…
Please note, I’m not talking high-end details, like using a For loop instead of Select Case statements (can cause memory issues because of the jump instruction.) I’m talking about Action(){return0;} instead of an actual function.
That’s not lazy, that’s incompetent (for coding, very competent for getting hired.)
JavaScript was created in 10 days in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, then working at Netscape and now of Mozilla.
In 1996 – 1997 JavaScript was taken to ECMA to carve out a standard specification, which other browser vendors could then implement based on the work done at Netscape. The work done over this period of time eventually led to the official release of ECMA-262 Ed.1: ECMAScript is the name of the official standard, with JavaScript being the most well known of the implementations.
ActionScript 3 is another well-known implementation of ECMAScript, with extensions (see below).
The standards process continued in cycles, with releases of ECMAScript 2 in 1998 and ECMAScript 3 in 1999, which is the baseline for modern day JavaScript. The “JS2” or “original ES4” work led by Waldemar Horwat (then of Netscape, now at Google) started in 2000 and at first, Microsoft seemed to participate and even implemented some of the proposals in their JScript.net language.
Over time it was clear though that Microsoft had no intention of cooperating or implementing proper JS in IE, even though they had no competing proposal and they had a partial (and diverged at this point) implementation on the .NET server side. So by 2003 the JS2/original-ES4 work was mothballed.
The next major event was in 2005, with two major happenings in JavaScript’s history. First, Brendan Eich and Mozilla rejoined Ecma as a not-for-profit member and work started on E4X, ECMA-357, which came from ex-Microsoft employees at BEA (originally acquired as Crossgain). This led to working jointly with Macromedia, who were implementing E4X in ActionScript 3(ActionScript 3 was a fork of Waldemar’s JS2/original-ES4 work).
So, along with Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe), work restarted on ECMAScript 4 with the goal of standardizing what was in AS3 and implementing it in SpiderMonkey. To this end, Adobe released the “AVM2”, code named Tamarin, as an open source project. But Tamarin and AS3 were too different from web JavaScript to converge, as was realized by the parties in 2007 and 2008.
Alas, there was still turmoil between the various players; Doug Crockford — then at Yahoo! — joined forces with Microsoft in 2007 to oppose ECMAScript 4, which led to the ECMAScript 3.1 effort.
While all of this was happening the open source and developer communities set to work to revolutionize what could be done with JavaScript. This community effort was sparked in 2005 when Jesse James Garrett released a white paper in which he coined the term Ajax, and described a set of technologies, of which JavaScript was the backbone, used to create web applications where data can be loaded in the background, avoiding the need for full page reloads and resulting in more dynamic applications.
This resulted in a renaissance period of JavaScript usage spearheaded by open source libraries and the communities that formed around them, with libraries such as Prototype, jQuery, Dojo and Mootools and others being released.
In July of 2008 the disparate parties on either side came together in Oslo. This led to the eventual agreement in early 2009 to rename ECMAScript 3.1 to ECMAScript 5 and drive the language forward using an agenda that is known as Harmony.
All of this then brings us to today, with JavaScript entering a completely new and exciting cycle of evolution, innovation and standardisation, with new developments such as the Nodejs platform, allowing us to use JavaScript on the server-side, and HTML5 APIs to control user media, open up web sockets for always-on communication, get data on geographical location and device features such as accelerometer, and more.
test tetst ttest stst etststst
Finally!!!!!!!! A rant to computer “experts” and “engineers”. Pardon my french. Not directed at Eric who i know is just as frustrated with this s**t as I am. this comment NSFW.
You need to fix these g*d d**m bugs with computer code. Some of them are DECADES OLD. And its clear no one is fixing them. The majority of us only use computers because they are there and we have no choice. WE ARE NOT EXPERTS AT COMPUTING AND DON’T WANT TO BE. We have our own s**t to deal with. Why do we put up with yours?
Fix these stupid things instead of adding new “features” we will never use because we are wasting time with your g*d d**m work arounds that don’t work.
Cookies and caches have been a pain the a** since I started using the net back in the early 1990’s. WHY ARE THEY STILL PROBLEMS 20-25 years later????? FIX THEM!!!!! or get rid of them……
Make it so computers are appliances like my refrigerator or garage door opener. Why do we need to be IT people to use these things? You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but we have to be experts to surf simple websites?
END of rant. Thank you for the platform Eric.
What finally worked for me to get firefox (on a mac) to work again.
Went to preferences under the firefox menu, picked privacy, in the privacy section pick history and put a check in the clear history when firefox closes, there will be a settings box to the right of that. In that box put a check in the cache box. You may what to uncheck the active logins so it doesn’t log you out of all the websites your logged into. Then click the ok button. Then restart firefox
May have to do it a couple times before it finally works. It seems to change on its own, which isn’t a good sign when it comes to privacy hmmmmmm.
The software people are off breaking things that worked decades ago.
The web text box worked 20 years ago but somehow in the last year or so it is getting broken across platforms. Random cursor jumps. Backspace jumps to a random spot. Sometimes typing or pasting stops working. Have to click out and back in again. Just all sorts of annoying as *&%! stuff. And it doesn’t get fixed. Instead it goes and infects another platform. I feel like I am using an old multiuser system that doesn’t properly accept the terminal I’m using. At least that could be fixed by a clever user. Damn web text boxes have no settings to tweak.
As an end user we shouldn’t have to know that cookies and cache are! And yet we have too. I remember having something not work on a website back in 1994 or so. The answer from IT empty your cache. My what? I say, they walk me through it. My next question, why doesn’t it clear itself, its software, not some crud you have to empty out of it and throw in the trash can? Some lame non answer answer. And 22 years or so later, still this same sh*t. The question still is: Why can’t it empty itself, its software, it probably is a couple of lines of code. and it would never bother people again. WHY WHY WHY
The cache is stuff saved to your harddrive locally so it doesn’t have to fetch it from the network again. This makes the page load faster. However when something goes screwy you can’t see any changes made on the site because it’s loading from your own HD.
There are often browser settings to clear it at shut down or limit its size to zero or something very small. It’s working as designed.
If it was “working” as designed, I wouldn’t know about it. But I do because its getting in the way and breaking.
It should empty itself, but only does it you go in all those little settings boxes and tell it too when it craps out. Something an end user shouldn’t have to do. It should be the default. Ease of use and reliability for the end user should ALWAYS be the default.
That is my biggest beef with computers in general. It should conform to me, not the other way around. We conform to all of its little defects, bugs and junk.
I don’t know why people tolerate it. Any other industry this level of unreliability would never be tolerated. Would you tolerate your garage door opener if it only opened the door half the time? Of course you wouldn’t. You would rip that piece of crap out. But yet people tolerate how often computers are broken or nearly so.
And we are going to allow computers to drive for us? That is insane at this point!!!!
“I don’t know why people tolerate it.”
Too stupid, too uncaring, too interested in the next Shiny.
Stupid Magpie Apes.
The problem isn’t that the computers are broken.
The people are what’s broken.
So…..what “broke” in me that has had Ff very briefly disappearing so I see the desktop for a fraction of a second and then it’s back? Been going on for the last 4 days or so.
I wrote my first program in ’68 before most everybody here was even a gleam in their mama’s eye. I didn’t particularly like doing it so I got on another horse.
Should everybody who drives a car have to be a mechanic? It’s the equivalent of having a plumbers license to take a shower. Fuck that.
It’s Javascript.
A shite stateless language that some idiot (likely a woman… Explained below) thought was great because it made all sorts of client-side (your browser – sends the load to the client) interactivity.
LOTS and LOTS of “responsiveness” for “engagement” of the viewer.
Hence, I think a woman. She values appearance and DooDads over actual functionality.
Tech details: Until the most recent Chrome version or so, and still in every other browser, Javascript is single-threaded. That means ONE core runs everything, and if an instruction has an issue, you’re jammed up until that wait or error is resolved. Errors don’t necessarily GET resolved – think of DOS and when things simply froze. Windows 3.1 was the same deal, if it stalled, the entire system died.
But it’s “pretty” and “interactive” (think like a child or even infant, it must make noise so he/she feels “empowered.” Same thing with these infants of the mind.)
Had a rant, but it’s not needed.
Developers are ego-driven. Clovers in their own way.
Think Tom Cruise from “Top Gun.” Except not as competent.
Gary North says website developers are not necessarily ego-driven, but laaaaazy. Do whatever is easier for themselves and screw the end-user. If corporate management were more aware (????) they would not let them get away w/it. The customer is supposed to be more important.
Corporate doesn’t care, either.
It’s why they work so hard to discourage competition – we got your money, and you don’t really have any other choices anyway…
Compare our friend Eric here with Car and Driver; who is doing better? Who is working harder to stay in one place?
Best example I have, it’s an outright CRIME.
Guy at ADP with an unpronounceable name, he came in as a developer/contractor. WORST defect list of ANY developer in the group. NOTHING worked on the first try.
Additionally, he was ALWAYS “Code Complete” within the first week of the cycle. He stubbed out every method… To give an example:
Action1 () {
return 0;
}
That was EVERYTHING he had to write. So he “made his deadline” and then had the highest defect close rate.
They brought him on as an employee, then promoted him, then promoted him again… All in about 2 years (had to break the rules for it to happen.)
Management didn’t care. He “motivated” people to get their coding done. He “managed” development and deployment. He spent all day looking at p0rn online, according to the IT department… But he was second in command in about 9 months. REALLY. Impressive.
Then he started destroying things, but it was a bit too late to get rid of him. I left before I found out the extent of the cancer, but – he was instrumental in my decision. Someone tells you that the big boss is in a conference with this guy, and this guy is arranging work between you and another guy NOT EVEN ON YOUR TEAM… Same work, mind – but Test A will pass, so give it to Mr. X, and Test B will fail, so have Jean do that one…
All they care about is getting something delivered by the date, throw it over the wall, it’s someone else’s problem then. E.G., 5 week development & test cycle, if it takes them 4 weeks 4 days to deliver, well, THEY were on time, if only QA would do their job! QA is the reason it didn’t go to PROD…
Please note, I’m not talking high-end details, like using a For loop instead of Select Case statements (can cause memory issues because of the jump instruction.) I’m talking about Action(){return0;} instead of an actual function.
That’s not lazy, that’s incompetent (for coding, very competent for getting hired.)
testtesttest and test
all I had to do was clear cookies….
Seems to work! Can you see it?