| A lot of 1990s web technology is only comprehensible through the lens of absolutely enormous amounts of money being poured into it because some people saw a chance to displace Microsoft by getting a runtime onto everyone's system that didn't depend on them. This money ran way ahead of engineering's understanding of how to build a system like this, so we got stuck with some deeply suboptimal decisions because some suits needed this tech now now now if not yesterday to compete with Microsoft. Even Javascript itself is the product of that, because Brendan Eich was given like a week to produce the counterproposal to having Java as the main runtime in the browser. Certainly no matter how you slice it after decades of experience we were going to have some opinions about how to fix it, but how many of the JS "WTF"s could have been avoided if he'd been given so much as, let's say, two weeks? Reading anything about Netscape in those days shows that A: the engineers were smart and experienced and worked miracles with what they were given (IMHO, far beyond anything the suits had a right to expect from them) but B: ultimately they simply didn't have anywhere near enough time to do the sort of work the suits were demanding. Ye olde "can't make a baby with 9 women in one month" struck them hard... no matter how many people they could throw at the problem, you just can't bring up an entire tech stack like that in an all-fired tearing hurry and expect good business results. I'm deeply unconvinced that if Java itself had not been lifted by this tide that it would be the #1 programming language today. It certainly has some neat advantages over C++, but it has a lot of massive deficiencies too, and I can assure you that some of them are so obvious that I could see them in the language as a computer science senior with already a couple languages under my belt in 1999. The amount of tooling around Java to overcome those deficiencies remains quite staggering. I find it amusing that ultimately, Sun was correct. The browser could be used to lever Microsoft out of its desktop dominance. Just not without about another 15-20 years of development. And when that development finally occurred... it was ultimately Microsoft that produced the web-based office suite anyhow.... yup, desktop Office dominance successfully displaced! By Microsoft. |
Everyone should be cheering on this stumble because we came within inches of MSInternet that worked on IE only powered by the ActiveX controls or whatever other proprietary bullshit Redmond wanted to foist on us.