History
Eich "wrote JavaScript in ten days" in 1995, having been "recruited to Netscape with the promise of 'doing Scheme' in the browser". (The idea of using Scheme was abandoned when "engineering management that the language must ‘look like Java’".) In fall 1996, Eich, needing to "pay off substantial technical debt" left from the first year, "stayed home for two weeks to rewrite Mocha as the codebase that became known as SpiderMonkey". The name SpiderMonkey was chosen as a reference to the movie Beavis and Butt-head Do America, in which the character Tom Anderson mentions that the title characters were "whacking off like a couple of spider monkeys." In 2011, Eich transferred management, termed ownership, of the SpiderMonkey code to Dave Mandelin.
Read more about this topic: SpiderMonkey (JavaScript Engine)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)