As our resident JS defender, I must remind you that Javascript was not delivered unto the web by a proclamation of God, but by being the least bad option compared to every other attempt at what it did:
- VBScript? Dead.
- Flash? Dead.
- XSLT? Dead.
- Silverlight? Dead.
- Java applets? Dead.
- Dart? Dead.
- GWT? Dead.
I mean, I wish we got Scheme too, but Eich had a week to implement a programming language, and he wanted one that felt "mainstream" enough. I think Javascript mostly survived because it had no licensing baggage, was lightweight, worked with the DOM instead of against it, was supported in both IE and Netscape, and was familiar enough that "normal" programmers would engage with it. As shit as our software world is, it could be worse. (I'm just glad that Microsoft failed to win the browser wars. We'd all be stuck on Windows as a consequence, and I suspect that software itself would come to be seen as an idea that Microsoft owns/invented.)
Although I still think that if computers/networks had been faster at the time, Java may well have taken over the browser, and become the de-facto "main programming language" of the entire world. My understanding is that applets took to long to download, and took to long to initialize once downloaded.