[BrendanEich]

> Javascript has been a multi-billion dollar focus by several top-tier engineering companies for almost two decades.

No, that's an exaggeration in time and dollars.

JS was one full-time person, me, till fall 1996, then two. Growth after that was to about eight max, and less than the Java crew at Netscape, until Netscape folded on Java and laid off a bunch of people in late 1997. Call the Netscape investment 8 years x 8 people = 64.

On the IE side, the JScript engine reused a common assembly-coded COM-dispatching indirect-threaded (I think) interpreter, and seemed from what I could tell to take about 6 people, but I'll round up to 8. No LiveConnect and COM based infrastructure saved them compared to Netscape. Ignoring JScript.net in Y2K era, the investment until the IE6 stagnation (skeleton crew) looks like at most 6 x 8 = 48.

Apple did not start with KJS till 2001, I believe. They've always had at most 3 people on JavaScriptCore, they run a tight ship: 14 x 3 = 42.

Chrome started V8 in 2006, as far as I can tell. Lars and a team of U. Aarhus and Google on his farm wrote four versions I hear (good idea: prototype, learn, tear up and rewrite). Call that 2 x 10 = 20 for first two years, then since I think it is more like 5 x 20 = 100.

64 + 48 + 42 + 120 = 274 person-years. Even at $1M/person/year, well high even with Google wealth effect of RSUs (for most; I'm guessing, but an outlier like Lars or Kaspar getting rich does not count; really we should stick to base salary + benefits/burden overhead), that's well shy of "multi-billion".

You can say JS learned from all the JIT research before it. You'd be right, but your statement was exclusive to JS and so excluded that upstream, and fair's fair: that helped other languages who could read the literature and code.

EDIT: Eric Lawrence on twitter reminds me that Chakra has a big team, I hear ~60 heads. That seems to be since 2009. Still well south of "multi-billion", even with my absurdly high $1M/year burdened engineer price.

/be

[lstamour]

This kind of post and response, meaningless in the grand scheme of things, is why I come to HN. You never know who will be next to say X sucks and then have someone personally involved in creating X speak up unexpectedly. Makes you want to apologize for saying X sucks in the first place, except you're not because without it you wouldn't get the resulting conversation. ;-) It does make me wonder, what things have I said about somebody's creation and then have them come along and see it. Sometimes it's just hard to remember there are real humans on the other side of this screen. ... And with that, I know I'm up too late. Good night all, and thanks for the post, Brenden. I did want to point out though... You forgot IE 10 and especially 11, plus the fun Opera Mini must have had remotely executing JS for a brief time. But these wouldn't significantly revise the numbers up too much. I'd add Adobe to the mix, but ActionScript and AIR are maybe too far from a browser to count for much evolution in JS terms.

[BrendanEich]

Right, see EDIT for Chakra, and yes, I forgot Opera. Lars Thomas Hansen, then Chris Pine, on LinearB and Futhark; then Jens Lindstrom and (I heard) a small team in Sweden on Carakan.

Also (ahem), I forgot Mozilla in the post-2003 era.

Still, no matter the addenda and the crazy $1M/person-year, nowhere near even $1B.

[stcredzero]

You never know who will be next to say X sucks and then have someone personally involved in creating X speak up unexpectedly.

So then HN is now the /. of the mid 201X? /. Was at its best when people in the know were finally pissed off enough to chime in and set the hooligans straight.

[Benvie]

It does make me wonder, what things have I said about somebody's creation and then have them come along and see it

I passingly wrote some disparaging remarks in a github issue about the ES6 binary data strawman spec written by Dave Herman, pretty much out of my own ignorance, only to get a message from him a few months later asking for feedback on it and what I thought was wrong.

By this point I had learned more about the topic and reading the spec language and knew enough to know I had just been an idiot. I ashamedly responded with an apology and basically told him that my criticism could be ignored because it came from my lack of understanding and not a real problem with the spec.

[magicalist]

It's pretty interesting to see it laid out there in person years. It really is a small number (especially compared to the much larger number of bodies working on other parts of those browsers).

I'll still take umbrage with the "MIT approach over Hacker approach" comment by the OP. "Worse is better" is fairly independent of that, and I think it does do disservice not only to the academic shoulders that the modern JS engines stand on, but also the academic brains packed into most of the JS engine teams (even just starting with the backgrounds of the editors of the asm.js spec).

It's also amusing, of course, that the submitter of this article is bzbarsky, who has done amazing work for the web and whose mailing list correspondence, at least, all comes from an address ending with "@mit.edu" :)

[bzbarsky]

In fairness, that's just the address I use for most of my email in general. My only affiliation with MIT at this point is being an alum.

That said, I do have a tendency to err on the "not worse" side, I think. And yes, we did read "Worse Is Better" in http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... (or rather its decade-older incarnation). ;)

[Ygg2]

It's not my name: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

And I don't feel one bit sorry about it. I guess I could call it Stanford(/MIT) way, but MIT is nicer, juicer target.

Also asm.js is the Worse is Better compared to PNaCl. It's simpler, it's a 'hack' of JS compiler, it's not as fast as native performance of PNaCl. But it epitome of the said approach.

C is also Worse is Better approach compared to Lisp and it had some of amazing people, work on it.