On: Growing a Compiler (2009)

[nothrabannosir → earthtolazlo]

And UNIX.

[eikenberry → nothrabannosir]

I think the "worse is better" [1] theory explains this much better. Although Javascript had the additional benefit of not having any competition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

[tomjakubowski → eikenberry]

No competition? How about Flash, Java applets, ActiveX, Silverlight, and even VBScript -- which Microsoft pushed to compete directly with JavaScript as the embedded scripting language for the web.

[pcr0 → tomjakubowski]

All of those were either additional plugins that had to be installed, came with a huge vulnerability surface and/or were closed standards.

[srcmap → tomjakubowski]

JavaScript lives in a more diverse environments: Multiple browsers, webkit engine, now NodeJS, React, etc.

Varieties, cross pollination from different JS engine/teams make JS much stronger.

Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, VBScript are all seem more mono-culture - Start to die as soon as the parent organizations/core dev team loss interest / move on to to next best thing.

Flash is a successful until CPU usage, security issues kill it. Just like strong mono-culture plant in a farm got wipe out certain deceases/virus.