As it’s name implies, originally NOT designed for programming large applications, “for someone who is at best an occasional programmer or when you want to do something that is lightweight.” — and I write that here on this massive JavaScript application.
The article mentions Microsoft is due to release it’s own tool for distributed applications “on Thursday.” I wonder what that was? It couldn’t have been .NET, that wasn’t released until sometime in the early 2000s.
No .net was years away. Microsoft made their own version of Java, their own VM. Sun sued them to stop doing it and inadvertently ended up creating .Net as a result.
What the article was referring to here though was the plethora of application scripting languages that popped up in the 80-90s. From Applescript to Visual Basic for Applications.
Of course being Bill Gates’ Microsoft that competitor to JavaScript was always going to be BASIC ie VBScript.
It’s the reason why script tags had a language attribute (long deprecated). Microsoft wanted the web to have pluggable languages which were tied to the underlying operating system. They had their own version of JavaScript which was called JScript which relied heavily on the underlying COM object system of windows.
You can see echoes of that in the XMLHttpRequest object which evolved from one of those.
John Hardy Developer 
As it’s name implies, originally NOT designed for programming large applications, “for someone who is at best an occasional programmer or when you want to do something that is lightweight.” — and I write that here on this massive JavaScript application.
The article mentions Microsoft is due to release it’s own tool for distributed applications “on Thursday.” I wonder what that was? It couldn’t have been .NET, that wasn’t released until sometime in the early 2000s.
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No .net was years away. Microsoft made their own version of Java, their own VM. Sun sued them to stop doing it and inadvertently ended up creating .Net as a result.
What the article was referring to here though was the plethora of application scripting languages that popped up in the 80-90s. From Applescript to Visual Basic for Applications.
Of course being Bill Gates’ Microsoft that competitor to JavaScript was always going to be BASIC ie VBScript.
It’s the reason why script tags had a language attribute (long deprecated). Microsoft wanted the web to have pluggable languages which were tied to the underlying operating system. They had their own version of JavaScript which was called JScript which relied heavily on the underlying COM object system of windows.
You can see echoes of that in the XMLHttpRequest object which evolved from one of those.
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Such clear memories of that time. Making it up as we went along, we were…
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