this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Programming
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I'm for saying "fuck JavaScript" and moving on to something more sane. Even visual basic for the web would make sense. LUA for the web, or even Python, but fuck JavaScript.
I say let oracle have it. Let the language die.
Microsoft tried to add VBScript to Internet Explorer in 1996, and the ghost of it lurked around in IE until it was old enough to drive. It never caught on.
VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn't care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.
"AJAX" (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.