[ElfinTrousers]

I'd say not so much because of the timing but because JS was only meant to be a crude stopgap: the scripting language they'd use for a year or two and then replace. The rest is history, the history of a huge sector of our industry built on a hilariously inadequate foundation.

[hnbad]

That's a bit ahistorical. JS was Netscape's scripting language and was supported in both their browser and server. The name change only happened because Java had arrived on the scene and Netscape cut a deal with Sun so JS would not be seen as a direct competitor to Java, the "real" programming language for browser applications. That it was pretty much rushed out the door was more of a product of the times it was born into, namely the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft.

Microsoft tried to push VBScript as a competitor to JavaScript and ended up copying JavaScript's implementation as JScript. Netscape desperately tried to standardize JavaScript to give it legitimacy (which is how we ended up with ECMAScript, due to the trademark limitations and ECMA being the only standards body that didn't require a lengthy application process).

If you think JavaScript's history is bad, don't look too closely at HTML, a language designed so academics could share information with each other. The Semantic Web pretty much died when search engines became a thing. There's entire offshoots to XHTML that make ES4 look like a success story.

EDIT: It's worth remembering not only what the world looked like that JS was born into but also how the entire Internet evolved since then. Due to JavaScript's unique position, it is heavily invested in backwards compatibility. Except for a number of security-related breaking changes and removals of experimental APIs that never caught on, code written in the early days will still run in modern browsers because it has to. This puts a lot of constraints on its design process and evolution and yet we still see the language undergo massive changes over the past years.

[xctr94]

Would it be better if the language stopped evolving?

[replygirl]

inadequate for what? js excels far beyond its intended purpose