
JavaScript: The most Misunderstood Programming Language (2010) - type0
https://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html
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RNCTX
Ironically, the author defines the primary aspect of his life's work as the
desire to:

> transform JavaScript into a secure language, which is part of my plan to
> transform the web into a safe platform for mashups, advertising, and
> commerce.

My memory of the early internet business days was that it was specifically
advertising and commerce that held back Javascript for about a decade. AOL
would not ship a Javascript capable browser because they thought they could
monopolize the entire internet by sending "free 100 hours of internet" CDs in
the mail and every magazine.

Monopolization of internet technologies was such a good idea that Microsoft
then decided to try to do the same thing, and also not implement Javascript
properly because they didn't own and charge a license fee for it.

In fact, if memory serves me correctly, the reason for the rise of PHP back in
the early internet days was as a server-side rendered replacement for browser
scripting was the poor state of Javascript engines. If you take the logic away
from the AOLs and Microsofts of the world, then they can't break your
complicated, interactive website while bickering with each other by breaking
things on purpose. The lure of writing things in PHP was that it spit out raw
HTML separately from a browser, and HTML was the only thing everyone agreed
on.

In short, Javascript might have gotten along farther, faster than it did, if
more people had been more concerned with building a better mousetrap than
building "advertising and commerce."

