Re:Writing a Lisp: Continuations
by panic on Thursday May 18, 2017 @09:12PM
(#14372356)
If only Brendan Eich had ended up "doing Scheme" in Netscape as he was originally recruited to! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786720)
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Javascript survived (and eventually caught on) not just because it was the "only game in town" for the web, but also because it was familiar.
If Eich indeed had produced a scheme, then it would have been superseded and replaced by another algol-derived language by browser makers soon -- and users would have flocked to that.
If familiarity mattered that much, why wasn't HTML itself replaced by something with curly braces, or CSS by something procedural?
Because HTML wasn't a programming language.
Template languages were like that (e.g. SGML) and worse.
Besides, unlike JavaScript it wasn't the product of a single vendor, but a standard, and the basis upon which the web stood from the beginning.