[wydfre]

Brendan Eich created the language in 10 days. Think about the billions of dollars and billions of man-hours that have spent related to a language not designed and slowly gained userbase, or scholarly, but a guy with a job. One guy. One guy in 10 days decided the fate of the internet. That's crazy.

https://thenewstack.io/brendan-eich-on-creating-javascript-i...

[brrrrrm]

You're referring to JavaScript whereas the post is about R

[wydfre]

Uh, you are right, I am an idiot. I just assumed that mistake was limited to one language... why did I have to be wrong about that.

[tyingq]

To be fair, "5" == 5 is true for Awk, Perl, and Tcl. All of which were pretty popular at the time.

Not discounting other implications of a 10 day design period :)

[int_19h]

Tcl isn't quite the same, since "5" and 5 are literally the same exact value in it, in all respects - not just equality. It's more of a problem in languages where, at the same time, 5+5==10 but "5"+"5"=="55".

[tyingq]

Ah yes, sure. Though "5"+"5" isn't "55" in Perl, Awk, or PHP either.

[xscott]

I wonder how different the world would be if he'd been allowed to use Scheme instead.