Tuesday, April 11, 2017

a history of JS power struggles

JavaScript was what it was before the coming of the iPhone in 2008. First it was called Mocha, then LiveScript, then JavaScript, and then ECMAScript (though name number three stuck) and this was all before it was worth caring about. Once Adobe Flash was not to be on the iPhone, HTML5 and JS was suddenly very trendy! Microsoft still pushed XAML and Silverlight but that wouldn't last but a few years. If we were going to care about silly little JavaScript that begged the question "What's the best way to approach it?" Do we write JavaScript itself? Do we use jQuery? Do we use dojo? jQuery wins that fight and becomes the thing to beat! Actual frameworks appear to challenge it! Knockout, Backbone, Ember, Angular, etc. AngularJS in turn then becomes the king of the hill and thus it becomes the thing to beat. It has significant problems with what at first seemed like ingenious two-way data binding. What do we do? Do we flow data in one direct with react.js instead? Do we make a better version of Angular like Aurelia? Well, both of these solutions seem Mickey Mouse in comparison to Microsoft and Google teaming up to give us Angular 2. And now we are, where we are.

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