ABSTRACT
Technology changes rapidly and not always in ways we can predict. Many years ago, while in graduate school at Penn State, I began exploring this newfangled thing called JavaScript. Everything I was hearing about it was largely negative. Conventional wisdom was that learning JavaScript was likely a waste of time. It did not work in all Web browsers. Even in the browsers where it could work, many people intentionally disabled it. Programmers ridiculed JavaScript for not being a “real” language-as JavaScript is not compiled. Macromedia Flash (which is now Adobe Flash) was heralded as the future of online interactivity and mapping. I subsequently sold my JavaScript guidebook and bought a Macromedia Flash one. Oops.
