Matthew Butterick wrote on 12/27/18 12:00 PM:
According to Brendan Eich, "The good parts of [JavaScript] go back to
Scheme and Self" [1] combined with "a lot of stupid". [2]
I appreciate Eich's candor and thoughtfulness there.
From Self, I think JavaScript initially got the prototype object model,
and possibly whatever slot access/dispatch optimizations Self used.
Self did some even more novel/noteworthy things, which PL enthusiasts
would want to know about: JIT or runtime incremental optimization,
visual/concrete programming active morphs worlds, and (I include this)
the morphs world object editors.
Self was very neat and exotic at the time I used it. And the set of
innovations suggests such a pleasing causal chain of necessity being the
mother of invention, that I don't want to know if it's not the truth:
morphs world => loose prototype-delegation concurrent objects => runtime
optimization.
Regarding Scheme, I suppose Eich might've just used a simple Scheme with
a prototype object model (it's very simple to implement). But Java was
already out there, the original purpose of LS/JS (IIRC) was merely glue
to load Java applets (not full-GUI-application DOM manipulation and
logic like today), and Sun had made Java have a C++/C syntax, because
that's the kind of programmer they thought would be developing in it. I
suppose, as soon as I was whipping up a "Java-ish light scripting
language" back then, even if Scheme was my inspiration, as soon as I was
figuring out the different syntax anyway, I probably would've simplified
semantics (e.g., free tail calls and first-class continuations would
seem unnecessary).
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