As I was reading, I couldn't help but thinking about why the world didn't turn out this way, and I came to the conclusion that in 1998 the only two companies who realized that the future of the web was the browser were Microsoft and AOL. [1] The rough isomorphism between HTML and Lisp S-expressions [2] was an obvious technical advantage over JavaScript and among the Lisps, though tellingly not the case with Scheme, the association list was already in place to do all the work that JSON has come to perform in exactly the same way but for syntax.
AOL of course destroyed Netscape after purchasing it by encumbering itself and all it touched with an East Coast Big Dumb Company mindset. It wasn't until years later when Google started seeing Microsoft as the competition that anyone else treated the browser strategically. By that time, JavaScript had won just by showing up in IE 6 and in the legacy Mozilla carried from Netscape.
What might have happened if Yahoo had decided the browser was strategic instead of living off banner ad revenue at the expense of increasing irrelevance? They had Graham and the Viaweb team, and so some manager decided to port their code to C++ and the rest, as they say, is history that never was.
[1] It is interesting to think that Apple would build its future in ways that treated the browser as a commodity - first with the iPod and then with the app store.
> among the Lisps, though tellingly not the case with Scheme, the association list was already in place
An association list is just a list which elements are conses. I'm fairly certain that cons, car and cdr were part of Scheme since the beginning and they are all you need to build assoc and friends. Scheme lacked a proper hashtable datatype though, which was present in some other Lisps.
he was talking about scope here. hashes do not help much.
assoc lists were important to implement dynamic environments simple and fast, which is not so easy with hash tables. In assoc lists you tolerate duplicates, but by putting new at the beginning you override/"shadow" the old ones, until you leave scope and use the old assoc list. and share the data! with hashes you have to actively delete or copy the tables. non-efficient and very complicated.
AOL of course destroyed Netscape after purchasing it by encumbering itself and all it touched with an East Coast Big Dumb Company mindset. It wasn't until years later when Google started seeing Microsoft as the competition that anyone else treated the browser strategically. By that time, JavaScript had won just by showing up in IE 6 and in the legacy Mozilla carried from Netscape.
What might have happened if Yahoo had decided the browser was strategic instead of living off banner ad revenue at the expense of increasing irrelevance? They had Graham and the Viaweb team, and so some manager decided to port their code to C++ and the rest, as they say, is history that never was.
[1] It is interesting to think that Apple would build its future in ways that treated the browser as a commodity - first with the iPod and then with the app store.
[2] See Slava Akhmechet's The Nature of Lisp. It's definitely worth reading: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html