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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

I've read that he'd wanted to just use Scheme, but that they needed the language to have "Java" in the name, as well as curly braces. So, we got Javascript.

Also, given that DSSSL was an early contender against CSS (and a great deal more powerful), we could have basically had Scheme there too. https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-languages-which-almost-becam...

Lastly, because S-expressions can represent everything that is representable in SGML/XML/(X)HTML, but more succinctly, we could have basically had Scheme instead of HTML.

Imagine if, instead of JS/HTML/CSS, we had... Scheme. I'm pretty sure that the alter universes where this happened also all have peace, warp drives, and working cold fusion.

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> Lastly, because S-expressions can represent everything that is representable in SGML/XML/(X)HTML, but more succinctly, we could have basically had Scheme instead of HTML.

I suggest (along with David Moon (Lisp Machine)) that a key disadvantage of sexp with respect to *ML, is that there's no place to hang on "extra stuff". Many lisps allow you to decorate the nodes with properties once the nodes are read, but the properties lack a printed representation. It's a homoiconicity fail. Sort of like not allowing comments in JSON might be, if a common case was then to attach comments to the objects after they're loaded. That very isn't common, so the restrictiveness is worth it. It's not clear that's the case with sexp.

Some MIT people in the 90s tried to do approximately that with a new language they called Curl. But it was proprietary until too late.

Considering the language was first called Mocha and then Livescript, "Java in the name" was not a requirement - it's just that OO and Java were all the rage at the time, so they followed the fashion.

The worst crime Sun ever committed will turn out to be influencing the birth of JS.

Well fork Lua, call the fork JavaStuff and be done with it. How can anybody think it's a good idea to create a language in 2 weeks and call it a day ?

And now WebAssembly is made of s-expressions (in textual form). If you are right, I am curious of what will be the future of the web.

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