[BrendanEich]

Second reply, sorry — I meant to agree that Turing incomplete languages for things like bounded runtime / all-paths constant time algs are an underutilized toolset. They're coming back on Blockchain, also for browser compositor-thread scripting.

But the pressure on the Web to be interactive enough vs. fat or old clients, never mind plugins, pushed not only JS but Java into the Netscape browser in 1995. I don't see how that could have gone another way in time to avoid MS doing the same.

The idea of a general Web scripting language was to make a relief valve where developers ran up against the limits of existing markup and less expressive languages the browser processed. Then standards bodies were supposed to study the top JS libs and absorb their Turing-incomplete bits into new HTML and CSS. This happened eventually, but not for so long that we had to invent XUL at Mozilla, Adobe did Flex, etc.