Every day that I program in JavaScript I wish we had Display Postscript or NeWS ...

mhd · on March 1, 2020

It's not PostScript instead of JavaScript. It's PostScript instead of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. That's (IMHO) the more important point. One programming language to write and structure everything instead of a bastardized SGML plus a bastardized Java plus an ad-hoc config add-on.

I'd much rather have (a slightly saner) JS for everything than PostScript plus HTML plus CSS, if I would have to choose.

ptx · on March 1, 2020

Netscape 4 actually had JavaScript-based stylesheets, before everyone settled on the CSS standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets

mhd · on March 2, 2020

Neat, I wasn't aware of that. Ah, the things that could've been.

masswerk · on March 1, 2020

However, fashions in languages are a thing. While PostScript was hot by the mid 1980s, few were using it 10 years later, as there were now WYSIWYG PostScript editors like Illustrater, XPress, Page Maker, etc. Now, these were the days of C(++) and Perl, as may be observed in the JS syntax. But it would have been nice, if it had started with ECMA script (as opposed to LiveScript) and SVG had been already around.

tonyedgecombe · on March 1, 2020

Imagine if browsers had evolved with Postscript instead of JavaScript.

Adobe would have a stranglehold on the market instead of Google.