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A comment on John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language. Parent comment

Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by pmelendez on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:13AM (#9811106)
> when you create a tool for the masses, the individual preferences should be the last in line

Well Javascript is Javascript because of some guy personal prefences at Netscape. The same is true for C# and Java in their respective companies, and they didn't start as popular languages either.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by toyg on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @08:17AM (#9811332)
Javascript is literally the poster child for "accidental and completely illogical success". It's the only mainstream language that did not have to compete with anything else because of accidents of history.
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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by rprospero on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:06AM (#9811549)
Technically, it did have to compete with VBScript, back when IE had browser dominance and VBScript support.
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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by toyg on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:16AM (#9811584)
But Netscape never had support for vbscript, so until they died Javascript/JScript was the only choice. By the time IE reached dominance, the industry had already standardized on JS.
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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:38AM (#9811671)
JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme not once but twice, and the reason we use it instead of a Lisp in the browser is the insane competition with Microsoft. Source: interviews in Coders at Work.
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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by DennisP on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:34AM (#9811654)
And that guy wanted to just use Scheme, but got overruled by management.
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