alt Hacker NewsThis is such a weirdly antagonistic take. Javascript was out there first, and it was good enough, and a vast improvement over both flash and java in the browser. There's no guarantee that some committee designed language would have ever made it out to the public, let alone that it ever would have gotten any kind of uptake, or that it would have been better than javascript.
JS at the time was obviously thrown together in a huge rush as a very poorly designed landgrab during the dotcom IPO goldrush.
"Designed by committee" as the alternative is a false dichotomy.
There was already much better work in languages for this kind of purported requirement of non-programmer (or less-programmer) use. JS obviously didn't even try to address those users.
And there were certainly better languages for letting full-programmers accomplish the same things.
Even Sun themselves internally had better work on multimedia Web browser at the time.
Instead, some team just threw anything at being able to make the press release they wanted to make, ASAP, not caring whether it was trash, or they could've even done better within the press release time constraint if they cared.