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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps not, but a world without computers would be markedly different from the world we live in, whereas a world without Javascript and the ability to update a webpage without reloading it would be... pretty much just like the world we're living in now, except perhaps less annoying.

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Most of the big-data processing stack (Hadoop, Spark, Tez, HBase etc) only really exists because adtech companies needed to process mountains of garbage logs and cookie data in daily batch jobs. So they developed big-data libraries capable of it.

But those technologies are now used pretty widely across the whole tech industry, including in the hard sciences.

and don't forget. The internet porn industry pretty much invented the streaming video tech. we all take for granted. In fact, there use to be a saying that no Internet innovation can be considered a success until it has been adopted by the online porn industry.

idk an url of a video file passed to a player worked 20years ago as it does now.

"the streaming video tech" integrated the player into the browser to control it and show ads. not much gained imo.

> pretty much just like the world we're living in now, except perhaps less annoying.

Compare Mapquest vs Google Maps to know why Javascript is important

If you don't know what Mapquest was, there's your answer

If I had to go back to Mapquest to get away from a web experience that leaves about 10% of the screen for actual content, while harassing users about cookies, showing 3 different ad banners, having a sidebar with 40 unrelated teases, autoplaying a video, and tracking me so precisely that they can figure out what I'm going to do before I even realize it myself, then, yes, I'd make that trade. Every day of the week, and twice on Sunday. All of this is made possible by Javascript.

So you can tell me that Javascript is important, and I won't argue that, but it's like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you. (With apologies to Dilbert.) It seems like Brendan Eich is a nice guy, but if he knew how people would use JS to make the average top-100 site today -- and make page loads take several seconds over a gigabit ethernet connection on one of the world's fastest laptops -- would he do it all over again?

Google maps is almost useless for the last mile(s) now that its quality has declined so much that no street names are present except in worthlessly unzoomed views.

Google maps was better than Mapquest when Google first put theirs on line, and better than either one is any more.

Google has simply declined below the baseline by failing to be as useful as they once were.

Mapquest remains more performant if less popular by comparison.

A reasonable explanation is that Google engineers & business operators are not as advanced as they were 20 years ago, likely not as dissimilar to average employees elsewhere any more.

This kind of thing is more common than you think.

From what I understand of the 21st century hiring process that is expected.

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