I just read Beating the Averages, and Mr. Graham writes that they had a significant advantage over competitors because they used Lisp.
From what I understand, Viaweb was a WYSIWYG editor that ran in the browser for customers to create their own ‘stores’. This is obviously inconceivable now to do without JavaScript, yet there is no talk of it at all on this article. Mr. Graham only talks about Lisp and nothing else.
So is (was?) it somehow possible to bypass JavaScript and use Lisp for the front and back ends?
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Javascript wasn’t widely used at the time. Viaweb was launched in 1995. JavaScript was only released in 1994 and was not in Internet Explorer until 1996. iframes didn’t appear until 1996 and XMLHTTP request didn’t show up for the first time until 1998, and not in browsers until later, so there was no AJAX when Viaweb was written. It’s likely that they did without a client-side scripting language and reloaded the whole page whenever anything was done.
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