> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of The Fool
[snip]
> > I'm intimately familiar with the genesis of Javascript, if
> > anyone cares to hear about it.
>
> Do Tell.
The short version is that in the early days of Netscape, which probably was
still called Mosaic Communications, they cut a marketing alliance with Sun,
focused on Java. Somebody in management, without really communicating with
engineering, thought that it would be really good to have a scripting
language that would interoperate with Java, sort of a Java-lite. So, when
the alliance was announced a short time later, they also announced that they
would co-develop Javascript.
I can imagine the conversations that took place: "You announced WHAT?"
"But we asked you if a scripting language was a good idea and you said yes."
"I didn't say we were ready to ship one in a month!" Of course, sales and
marketing people tend to assume that once you have the idea, implementation
is easy. At Verity, we coined the term SMOP for that -- Small Matter Of
Programming. Somebody, usually in sales (I was in marketing there) would
come up with a feature idea and toss it at product management and
engineering as though it would be trivial to do. We'd respond, "Oh, that's
a SMOP." I think some of the sales people thought SMOP actually is a term
of art in software development, not recognizing the bitter irony in it.
My co-author and I were just about to finalize a contract with O'Reilly to
write "Web Scripting with AppleScript and HyperCard" (hey, this was 1995,
probably). Seeing the Javascript press release, our editor offered us more
money if we would immediately switch gears and write a Javascript book
instead. "I think it's just a press release," was my response. He didn't
care, he just wanted to have the first Javascript book on the market. I
called friends in engineering at Netscape and they said, "It's just a press
release." Nobody in engineering had even begun to work on it until the
release came out. I told our editor, "It's just a press release." He
offered more money. We took it.
Meanwhile, at Netscape, a small team was under incredible pressure to ship a
beta ASAP. It was a SMOP, after all. And despite the Netscape-Sun
alliance, nobody at Sun had anything to do with Javascript. At all. So
some poor guys at Netscape had to cobble something together. There was no
alpha version at all, I think, and out came a beta. It worked... and then
out came the next beta, with enough changes to break everything. Rinse,
lather, repeat for a bunch of betas. The poor developers kept apologizing,
saying that they weren't being given time to do it right... and warning of
someday having to "cross the Rubicon" and do the language right. The first
big crossing was the eventual introduction of data tainting... which broke
everybody's scripts. Around that time, we gave up on the book. Other
publishers were coming out with books with scripts that had long since been
broken by new releases, but neither we nor O'Reilly were willing to be that,
uh, thoughtless. Last time I was paying attention, they were still warning
people that someday Javascript would have to be redesigned from the ground
up because it got off to such a bad start. I don't think that day ever
came.
Nick
