[ef4]

This kind of criticism misses the point. The web is not designed. It is evolved. Various bits of it were designed at their outset, but it was literally impossible to envision all the implications of those design decisions.

This is not a bad thing, for the simple reason that every long-lived complex system involving many humans must behave this way.

Any attempt to top-down design the perfect, universal, distributed application runtime hits fundamental social problems not unlike those in a centrally planned economy: too much information to integrate, too many stubbornly uncooperative humans with their own divergent goals and opinions.

Systems at this scale are much more like biology than like circuit design.

[jondubois]

Also JavaScript itself was designed to evolve in a backwards-compatible way. The way developers use JavaScript today is quite different from how they used it 10 years ago.

The idea that systems are fixed entities that have to be designed correctly up-front is wrong and is one of the reasons why the Waterfall model of software development has been superseded by Agile.

Good systems have to be designed to handle change. Change is the only constant thing in this world.

[lenkite]

Evolution at-least has mass extinction events. Lets hope that Web 2.0, which resembles a gigantic, evolved Kraken filled with various protuberances analogous to the large intestine appendix, suffers from one sometime in the future.