JavaScript creator ponders past, future

Mozilla's Brendan Eich describes JavaScript's history, the upcoming upgrade, and disagreements with Microsoft

And it was hard to do -- it was for professional programmers. It was for the high-powered real estate virtual tour or something like that. Whereas JavaScript was just a little snippet you could write, you could copy somebody else’s, you could learn as you went. You didn’t have to learn the whole language to use it and you could buy it by the yard.

That idea was very strongly held by Marc Andreessen and myself. Bill Joy at Sun was the champion of it, which was very helpful because that’s how we got the name. And we were pushing it as a little brother to Java, as a complementary language like Visual Basic was to C++ in Microsoft’s language families at the time. And it took off. We got it out in time.

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InfoWorld: Why do you think JavaScript has become so popular for Web programming and did you ever think that it would become this popular?

Eich: Because of the reach of the Web. The Web is the biggest, broadest platform, maybe not the best platform and people sometimes have to reach for the Flash Player or Microsoft’s putting out something called Silverlight, which is competing with Flash. But the Web is what everybody wants to use. You get a browser and an Internet kiosk, you can use it. So if JavaScript is the scripting language of the Web, it has the most reach.

And as computers got faster and JavaScript got better and other parts of the browser programming model -- the so-called libraries or APIs got better, the document object model got better -- people found they could do things they hadn’t dreamed of.

I will say that we didn’t think it would go this far because we were underinvesting in it at Netscape. I was kind of the lone gun for too long. But even in 1995 there were these great demos that would have held up today as sort of early AJAX almost. They didn’t have all the APIs for doing background I/O to a server. They had the reload pages but they would do it in the hidden frame and you could still do background communication that way. This was a proof that JavaScript could be used by itself with HTML and images to do amazing apps and only a few knew it was very esoteric.

And then, of course, it was much, much later that we had things like Google Maps and Google Mail and all the other AJAX apps people know about.

InfoWorld: I often hear criticism that JavaScript is kind of hard to work with. Would you agree with that or why do you think people feel that way?

Eich: There’s a general bad odor. [lingering from the browser wars and Internet Explorer's Document Object Model (DOM) being different]. The language implementation between the browsers agrees generally and pretty well compared to the library code, the so-called document object model. Other browsers' implementations tend to agree [with the DOM] because they came later and had a standards orientation.

I had an early version of the DOM that was somewhat proprietary; not all of it got standardized in the W3C and they never changed it for many years. IE6 was in 2001 and IE7 wasn’t for five years, I guess. And so there was this big gulf between the browsers, and when people come to JavaScript to program the browser they want the same APIs and they don’t get them.