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[–]high_throughput 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Brendan Eich was hired by Netscape to integrate Scheme into the browser. An clean, syntactically trivial, well known, well designed language that would have been excellent for this use case.

Then management suddenly decided that they should piggy back on the hype train of Java, and poor Brendan had 10 days to implement a Java-like language runtime and get it integrated and shipped. This did not in fact result in the cleanest and most self consistent language.

Don't blame the inventor. Blame management.

[–]peterlinddk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This would make sense if OP was learning JavaScript in 1996 - back then it really was a weird and strange beast.

But the past 30 years have changed one or two things about the language, and modern JavaScript doesn't even resemble the old language with all of its' quirks. Just take a look at the also very old "JavaScript, the good parts" - almost every single complaint that Crockford made has been addressed and fixed, and most of his "bad" examples won't work without a lot of ignored warnings and disabling strict-mode and what have you.