[greenkey]

I wish Matz had been there with Rubyscript. JS wasn’t as powerful back then; it took over a decade for it to evolve enough where people would really use it for much other than client-side validation and neat UI tricks. In comparison, Ruby was a great language to use, and it would’ve grown more quickly.

[toyg]

Ruby was first released on the same year. Python had been around for 4 years already. What could have been, eh...

[ptx]

There was (in 1995) a Python-based web browser called Grail[1] that could run client-side Python applets[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grail_(web_browser)

[2] http://grail.sourceforge.net/info/papers/restofus.html#apple...

[dan-robertson]

I wish they’d just used scheme

[colordrops]

Exactly - rubyscript would have been just as hated as javascript; something like scheme or some other well designed language would have been better.

[greenkey]

That’s kind of harsh. Ruby was a great language and especially great syntax. Except for some duplication of methods and early misspelling of one or two methods, it would’ve been much easier for people to learn and do cool things with that didn’t happen in JS until years later.

Scheme’s not bad, but I think if you compare The uptake of both, Ruby did better? (Not counting Lisp.) It was a cool language though; a lot of problems that would’ve been avoided, if people could type all the braces in correctly... for Lisp at least.

[speedgoose]

I think we would just have got more Java applets. The idea of a programming language accessible to everyone did contribute a lot to its success.