Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cccc4alll 1954 days ago
I just want to say thank you for all your contributions to advancing web technologies.

Javascript is still the only meaningful "Full Stack" platform and responsible for Billions of dollars in online business and Trillions of dollars in business value.
1 comments
paulryanrogers 1954 days ago
Is JS really the fundamental, responsible part in all that business? Would it have been so much worse with a full page refresh per click?
link
cccc4alll 1954 days ago
What would handle the click on the client browser? How would you handle all the user events in the client browser? clicks, mouse overs, selections, etc.

The Javascript platform is used to capture user behavior in the most efficient manner. This is the fundamental basis for all the online business processes and resulting business value.

link
paulryanrogers 1954 days ago
Before JS browsers handled clicks without any 3rd party code. They were much more predictable and easier to reason about as a user.

Those clicks usually translated to HTTP calls.

What is so fundamental about business processes that they can't do an extra page render and HTTP call? (I imagine there may be some, I just can't see how they are so fundamental and on the order of billions.)

link
BrendanEich 1954 days ago
Hotmail, Oddpost, Gmail, Gmaps, YouTube comments, etc etc.
link
paulryanrogers 1954 days ago
Funny enough I hear Gmail's plain HTML version is preferable for some here on HN.

Regardless I don't see how JS is fundamental to any of those services, not even Maps. Instead I suspect HTML would have become more feature rich sooner than HTML5.

I also don't believe JS itself contributes significantly to the trillions of dollars involved in online business.

link
cccc4alll 1953 days ago
The top 5 biggest companies rely on javascript for huge portion of online business.

Microsoft - introduced AJAX to support their web enabled servers and online services. Have since morphed into Cloud based company.

Apple - lots of iOS apps are simple webviews that use javascript.

Amazon - online sales and cloud services using javascript.

Google - online ad services using javascript.

Facebook - online user behavior analytics using javascript.

Pretty much the entire online economy has huge dependency on javascript.

link
BrendanEich 1954 days ago
Why introduce counterfactuals? Flash existed, it had a full JS-variant language. It was taking over restaurant and other sites due to the IE monopoly stagnating HTML/CSS/JS. We don't need to appeal to an imaginary Turing-incomplete no-JS world to argue that JS didn't contribute enough. Flash was clearly the answer! Right?
link