Comment by yoz
1 year ago
Most of the blame should go to Netscape management. They didn't give Eich much time, then burst in before he was done and made him copy a bunch of things from Java. (The new language, codenamed "Mocha" internally, was first publicly announced as "LiveScript", and then Sun threw a bunch of money at Netscape.)
IIRC, Eich was quite influenced by Python's design. I wish he'd just used Lua - would likely have saved a lot of pain. (Although, all that said, I have no idea what Lua looked like in 1994, and how much of its design has changed since then.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155
If you don't know what Lua was like then, don't wish that I'd "just used Lua".
Other issues include Netscape target system support, "make it look like Java" orders from above, without which it wouldn't have happened, and more.
Oh hi Yoz! LTNS! Hi Brendan!
It sounds like you're saying Yoz got the sequence of events wrong, and that MILLJ was a necessary part of getting scripting in the browser? I sort of had the impression that the reason they hired you in the first place was that they wanted scripting in the browser, but I wasn't there.
I don't think Lua was designed to enforce a security boundary between the user and the programmer, which was a pretty unusual requirement, and very tricky to retrofit. However, contrary to what you say in that comment, I don't think Lua's target system support or evolutionary path would have been a problem. The Lua runtime wasn't (and isn't) OS-dependent, and it didn't evolve rapidly.
But finding that out would have taken time, and time was extremely precious right then. Also, Lua wasn't open-source yet. (See https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/94-07-051.) And it didn't look like Java. So Lua had two fatal flaws, even apart from the opportunity cost of digging into it to see if it was suitable. Three if you count the security role thing.
Hi Kragen, hope you are well.
Yes, the Sun/Netscape Java deal included MILLJ orders from on high, and thereby wrecked any Scheme, HyperTalk, Logo, or Self syntax for what became JS.
Lua differed a lot (so did Python) back in 1995. Any existing language, ignoring the security probs, would be flash-frozen and (at best) slowly and spasmodically updated by something like the ECMA TC39 TG1 group, a perma-fork from 1995 on.
1 reply →