In the 1990s I was totally committed (not by choice) to C++ for software development, which is truly an amazing object-oriented language – I remember a company architect in the early 80s that object-oriented programming was going to be the 'next big thing'. And he was correct. And C++ was the pinnacle of OO type languages.
But after so many years with C++, I was getting tired of so many core dumps due to array out-of-bounds errors, et. al. That's why I got excited about James Gosling's Java programming language, the 'next big thing'. So I began attending multiple Java One conventions at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.
In one of the breakout sessions, I learned about this new scripting language called Javascript, and it set me on fire. I proceeded to buy a bunch of fat-book tutorials on Javascript to learn everything I could about the language. One of the first things I learned was that, while it was heralded at a Java Conference, it had nothing to do with Java, save the name and that they both have C-like syntax.
I was pretty excited about this new language, easily integrated into UI code, easy syntax, and most of all you DON'T HAVE TO COMPILE / LINK IT! If you make a change, just reload and re-run – which was perfect for the burgeoning new paradigm of browser based web applications. This was a great new tool to promote rapid application development. And given that web apps no longer provided client based logic per se, in contrast to heavyweight client apps, JavaScript provided the means for UI logic and filled in that hole quite nicely. And of course, like HTML, Javascript interpretation was handled by the browser, making it cross-platform agnostic (except for Internet Explorer 6, the biggest piece of sh*t software written in the history of software, But I digress).
This means that developers could still write code that kept the server from having to do a lot of frivolous logic, such as UI form validation for example, determining if two password input boxes had the same exact strings or not (or am I a robot?), among other more proprietary requirements. And in the 90s, there was a huge surge of processing power capability in laptops and desktops, which provided ample juice to allow more complicated logic to execute on front-end device browsers.
A simple google search of "Javascript Benefits" would list many of the niceties that I described above, but it is always better to experience them directly.
Javascript in the 21 Century
Here's where things got really interesting.
Around 2005, my team was purposed to create several small web based applications displaying read-only data sets based upon proprietary data. We already had a client based version of the applications, which looked like this:
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My Evolution with Javascript
Non-FictionI loved the Javascript language from the start and began incorporating JS into front-end code in the mid to late 90s. Discovering Javascript's network capabilities in the 2000s and building app with it, I soon realized that this was big! It wasn't t...
