[paulryanrogers]

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.)

[BrendanEich]

Hotmail, Oddpost, Gmail, Gmaps, YouTube comments, etc etc.

[paulryanrogers]

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.

[cccc4alll]

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.

[paulryanrogers]

Granted. And PHP runs like 30% of public websites. I doubt it's the JS driving most of the value though. I suspect much of their success was/is still possible without requiring trusting novel, 3rd party code, to be run on demand.

[BrendanEich]

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?

[httpsterio]

Even if you might be right, your combative style is very off-putting. You could choose not to reply at all, the comment wasn't directed at you and I personally would've liked to entertain the idea of a more server-side rendered present, but you're shutting down the discussion.

[BrendanEich]

I didn't even shut you down. What are you talking about? This is HN and you're on the Internet. Toughen up.

[paulryanrogers]

Turing incompetentes can be a feature IMO.

Anyway, my point is that none of the interactivity as delivered by JS / ActiveX / Flash are themselves reason for all the money in online business. Before graphical browsers there were probably billions in transactions happening on computer networks. And likely would have grown to similar highs without the ability to run untrusted, 3rd party code on demand.

[BrendanEich]

Second reply, sorry — I meant to agree that Turing incomplete languages for things like bounded runtime / all-paths constant time algs are an underutilized toolset. They're coming back on Blockchain, also for browser compositor-thread scripting.

But the pressure on the Web to be interactive enough vs. fat or old clients, never mind plugins, pushed not only JS but Java into the Netscape browser in 1995. I don't see how that could have gone another way in time to avoid MS doing the same.

The idea of a general Web scripting language was to make a relief valve where developers ran up against the limits of existing markup and less expressive languages the browser processed. Then standards bodies were supposed to study the top JS libs and absorb their Turing-incomplete bits into new HTML and CSS. This happened eventually, but not for so long that we had to invent XUL at Mozilla, Adobe did Flex, etc.

[BrendanEich]

Go prove it. Meanwhile, back in reality, Flash was taking over and it did have better JS-variant, better graphics, etc. before we in the HTML5 WHATWG group got browsers upgraded. No-JS happy talk about better Turing-incomplete HTML is idle talk. Go on if you must, but I'll stop here.

"I do not entertain hypotheticals. The world as it is is vexing enough." - Col. Stonehill, "True Grit"

[dboreham]

...or Java.