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Foone🏳️‍⚧️

There's an alternate universe where Netscape Navigator embedded Lua instead of inventing js, and I'm not sure if that's a better world or not.

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Jonathan ‘theJPster’ Pallant

Edited 17 days ago

@foone there’s another universe where VBScript was the winner

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@thejpster that's definitely a worse world

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@foone And the much closer one where they invented JS, but used scheme and S-expressions instead of C-style syntax.

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@lritter @foone Exactly.

Emacs would have become the de facto standard web development platform.

(I don't know if that would have been a better world, either, and I say this as a long-time emacs user).

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@darkling @lritter @foone I promise there is no scripting language choice that would convince web devs to use emacs.

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@foone

Having spent far too much of my life overthinking this, I will now share:

1. Lua hadn't really made it to North America by 1995; the go-to extension language at the time was Tcl or a Lisp dialect. (Perl was an option but not really suited to embedding, and Python was this new thing nobody used.)

2. Java was THE HYPE in 1994; JS has its syntax because management wanted that similarity.

So the obvious design for JS is OOP Lisp with C syntax. And that's what we got, only bad.

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@foone

I have vague memories of seeing a Scheme-based OSS project for basically JS's niche and later looking back at it to find a notice that they'd given up because JS did everything they wanted.

(This is all because I had an idea for a code jam: Two Weeks to Invent a Better JavaScript than Brendan Eich's.)

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