Comment by butlike

As always, hindsight is 20/20, but when you're living it, the half-baked decisions and add-ons are a product of you figuring it out on the fly. You don't have the knowledge of which proposal will solidify into an industry standard, and you don't know which vestigial implementations will be a nightmare for backwards compatibility down the line.

The context is also lost. Javascript was famously coded in a day or whatever and called 'javascript' not ecmascript as marketing to compete with Java. Besides that well known case there's presumably thousands of esoteric business decisions made back then which shaped the "sprawling, ludicrous" landscape, and which are now lost to time.

Yes, the web should have always been a programming language. And the flying cars of 23xx should have never used a z-debuffer doodad.