alt Hacker NewsLet's be real here. JavaScript didn't take off because it was functional in the functional programming sense. It took off because it was built in and procedural. You didn't need to muck around with objects if you were a total noob. You'd just write your functions and call them with strings as parameters.
Javascript took off because it was your only option for a lot of things. Flash and Java tried, but both were always hit and miss as to who could use it. Everybody had javascript in their browser so you had no choice if you were to reach them but meet them where they were.