Brendan Eich: evaluation

Transcript context

…When did you start to realize that this was a problem? I think even in 1996, Lou Montulli at Netscape did the cookie and there was a concern that it was being used for third-party tracking or could be used, but the genie was out of the bottle. The thing about the web is, Marc Andreessen said this to me, even when they were doing Mosaic and there were only like 80 servers hosting content they cared about not breaking, they would just keep backward compatibility in all the quirks of [...] as HTML parser, even precursor progenitor HTML processors, older browsers because the content wouldn't work properly. This is a strong evolutionary force, this gradient forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate because it means you really can't make incompatible changes, except very slowly or through new runtimes that you can download. JavaScript was the only bite at the apple for that kind of runtime. Java failed and Flash eventually failed. In the '90s, we were too busy making the first party experience good and we couldn't break the web. Even though Lou Montulli wanted to do twinkies, somehow I think they were going to solve several problems he wanted to solve. That's an evolution of cookies?…

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