Popularity, History, and SCRIPT SHARED
Date : 2008 04 04 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianBrendan Eich has responded to Doug Crockford talking about the popularity of JavaScript, and the hash method for sharing JavaScript, in his post on Popularity.
In in he starts out by discussing the history of JavaScript, warped as it may be:
As I've often said, and as others at Netscape can confirm, I was recruited
to Netscape with the promise of "doing
Scheme"
in the browser. At least client engineering management including
Tom Paquin,
Michael Toy, and
Rick Schell,
along with some guy named
Marc Andreessen, were convinced that
Netscape should embed a programming language, in source form, in HTML. So it
was hardly a case of me selling a "pointy-haired boss" -- more the reverse.
Whether that language should be Scheme was an open question, but Scheme was
the bait I went for in joining Netscape. Previously, at SGI,
Nick Thompson had turned me on to
SICP.
What was needed was a convincing proof of concept, AKA a demo. That, I
delivered, and in too-short order it was a fait accompli.
He continues to talk about how Java came into the equation and the question of "do we need two languages?" came out of that. Scheme with a Java like syntax? That is what won out in the end.
No need to smoke the hash?
Brendan also feels like the hash method has some failings such as security: poisoning attacks and the safety of crypto-hashes. Also, having hash="some crazy hash" would look a little ugly in your HTML :)
Brendan proposes a shared URL:
PLAIN TEXT HTML:<script src="http://my.edge.cached.startup.com/dojo-1.0.0.js" shared="http://o.aolcdn.com/dojo/1.0.0/dojo/dojo.xd.js"></script>
Imagine if we had an AOL CDN / YUI CDN that anyone could use? Some people may not like the "centralized" side of it, but I think it would be huge.