Re:Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
by mattmanser on Thursday January 02, 2020 @08:03PM
(#21941900)
It definitely did. IE6's JavaScript was super slow. You cannot even imagine how slow it was if you never worked in it.
Remember, IE6 was the dominate browser for years, so very slow JavaScript was the norm.
For example round about 2008 I made a client-side pivot table for a web app, tried it in JavaScript first, even trivial tables would take 10 seconds despite all the optimization I tried (in IE6, IE7 + Firefox).
I rewrote it using XML + XSLT and it was instant. But it was truly gnarly code.
I feel like that one simply missed the mark. If anything, there was greater emphasis towards languages that were more performant, even if less productive for banging out a working product.