”When I did JavaScript's regular expressions I was looking at Perl 4. I did step through it in the debugger, as well as read the code. And that gave me ideas; the implementation I did was similar. In this case the recursive backtracking nature of them was a little novel, so that I had to wrap my head around. It did help to just debug simple regular expressions, just to trace the execution. I know other programmers talk about this: you should step through code, you should understand what the dynamic state of the program looks like in various quick bird's-eye views or sanity checks, and I agree with that.” Brendan Eich in “Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming” Peter Seibel 2009 page 158/159

BrendanEich

Java inspired sort, which is in-place/mutating. TBH, JS1.0 in 1995 was under Perl influence; JS1.2 in 1997 fell more under Python influence.

12:00 AM · Juli 4th, 2017

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/881996154115837952

update

I'm only able to see this tweet in Firefox, kind of weird.

(Seems like you fired too many people, Elon!)

This is a link the current source of the Spidermonkey implementation of JS Arrays:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/js/src/builtin/Array.cpp

Searching for the word "Perl" shows a list of "Perl-ish methods" like join , reverse, push , etc

 
    /* Perl-ish methods. */
    JS_INLINABLE_FN("join", array_join, 1, 0, ArrayJoin),
    JS_FN("reverse", array_reverse, 0, 0),
    JS_TRAMPOLINE_FN("sort", array_sort, 1, 0, ArraySort),
    JS_INLINABLE_FN("push", array_push, 1, 0, ArrayPush),
    JS_INLINABLE_FN("pop", array_pop, 0, 0, ArrayPop),
    JS_INLINABLE_FN("shift", array_shift, 0, 0, ArrayShift),
    JS_FN("unshift", array_unshift, 1, 0),
    JS_FNINFO("splice", array_splice, &array_splice_info, 2, 0),
[download]

. The corresponding Perl functions can be found in perlfunc

I'm sure a repo of JS 1.0 would show more detailed comments regarding Perl

1. What's WP? 2. Last link is 403.

[WP://] : Wikipedia

Last link works for me, it's the image from

https://www.cnblogs.com/ziyunfei/archive/2013/02/06/2907681.html

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

Perl has vec(), pack() and unpack() and printf() and sprintf() which are entirely missing from JavaScript. Perl is very efficient at manipulating strings but not so fast working with arrays. JavaScript is just the opposite. It's very fast with arrays but slow with strings. Perl has hashes, while JavaScript has properties. I know, it's not the same, but it's a little bit similar.

JavaScript or rather JS1.0 is mostly a baby Perl with Java syntax. The prototype object system from Self being the main difference (objects are kind of blessed hashes which inherit from other objects not classes)

The claimed functional influence from Scheme is already present in Perl5. ( sub returns a function reference, making functions a first class object which can be treated like variables)

Block scoping was later introduced into JS with let . ( var is a mess )

The operators you list derive from C, a common predecessor for Perl and Java.

Actually "typecasting" in JS is a major problem, JS has no "scalars".

To better explain, there are two major ways to do dynamic typing.

A) a type is determined when initializing.

Like in Python where 3/2 is 1.

Why? Because 3 and 2 are integers. (Python introduced something like // later to address the confusion)

B) a type is determined by the operator.

Like in Perl where 3/2 is 1.5 and 3 . 2 is 32

JavaScript is a mongrel of both systems,

and the rules how + behaves confuse(d) the shit out of people.

You can remember that 1 + "1" is "11", but what will happen if you don't have full control about the types in the variables of a + b ?

JS programmers must resort to tricks like

'a+b+0' or 'a+b+""'

(IIRC, this depends on precedence and I have to look it up to be sure UPDATE guess what, I got it wrong, have to correct this later.

What's sure is that a+=0 becomes a number and a+="" a string )

Perl fixed this with a lot of operators, but people complain that the code looks unreadable, because of all the symbols.

But Brendan had 10 days to design the language which had to look like Java...

They fixed a lot of stuff in the meantime and introduced some nice python features.

But it's still annoying not to have pure hashes in JS ...

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}