[steve-howard]

Remember that the main reason PHP has such a broad user base is that it runs with fairly comparatively little setup on every server out there. That doesn't make it good. JavaScript is the only language to run in the browser because years ago someone developed it for that purpose. We could be using Python or Ruby or Brainfuck if there were any way to convince all major browser vendors to support that directly.

[gaius]

ISTR that Eich said he originally planned on Scheme in the browser, but for marketing reasons was ordered to make it look more like Java.