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A comment on What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995 (2017). Parent comment

Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by monocasa on Monday February 24, 2020 @04:53PM (#22408867)
And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by svachalek on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:25PM (#22409088)
I think most of it was written for the Closure compiler (JS-to-JS), with some bits like chat windows in GWT (Java-to-JS).
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by monocasa on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:29PM (#22409127)
I was under the impression that the closure compiler didn't exist in 2004, only GWT, and that it was rewritten to be almost all JS later.
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by nogridbag on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:03PM (#22408940)
Do you have a source for this? Google did create a Java to JavaScript compiler/web framework: GWT but as far as I understood this was never used by the Gmail team. In fact, I heard there was pushback against using this on Gmail.
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by cletus on Monday February 24, 2020 @06:12PM (#22409430)
This is factually inaccurate. Gmail is and was always JavaScript. GWT had some successes (eg AdWords). Gmail wasn’t one of them.
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by andykellr on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:11PM (#22408992)
Inbox was definitely written using GWT, as were other major google products, but not gmail as far as I know.
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by cletus on Monday February 24, 2020 @06:14PM (#22409439)
That’s not true. Inbox was written in Angular originally. Not sure what it evolved to but it was always JavaScript.
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Re:What people in tech had to say about JavaScript when it d... by dragonshed on Monday February 24, 2020 @08:12PM (#22410081)
Angular definitely did not catch on for google properties until much much later. Back when I did nothing but backbone/angular consulting, none of the major google properties used angular.
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