And we've been making the same "mistakes" with JS too!
But if PHP and JS are so shit and full of churn, why are they so popular and widely used? And have been used to build larger, globally successful projects?
But if PHP and JS are so shit and full of churn, why are they so popular and widely used? And have been used to build larger, globally successful projects?
Early history is in '95, Netscape hired Brendan Eich to embed Lisp in Netscape, while simultaneously pursuing a partnership with Sun to embed Java. Sometime that year, Lisp changed into a new language, which was created and shipped in beta, by September 1995. We're talking a few months.
If we had designed a sane framework upfront -- even 6 more months design time -- the web would likely be a decade or two ahead right now.
Most of the early "improvements" to JavaScript were stop-gaps created under similar cultures, which would need to be replaced again and again. It's not that we didn't know how to make a decent programming language in 1995; it's that we didn't.
Today, I do about half of my coding in JavaScript since it runs in the browser, and therefore on all platforms. It has nothing to do with the painfully bad language design.
Seeing how the trajectory of web development seems to be "pile on more and more complexity, most of it unnecessary", I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be sad or happy about this.