They had to add scripting capabilities, and be first at it (else MS would be the first). They had to make the language instantly understandable by an average programmer — that is, someone who has a Basic / Pascal / C / Java / Perl background, and an hour of time to get acquainted and like the language.
So they created a scripting language with a familiar C-like syntax, very few restraints, and a bunch of "convenient" magic that helped a person to create a simple animation in the browser on their very first day, by mashing things together.
This was a terrible strategy to create a nice language for safe and comfortable development of large applications, especially full desktop applications 20 years from the inception date.
It was a very well-working strategy to get mass adoption in no time, and own the market the same year in the face of mighty competition. This is what business cared about, and this allowed Netscape to stay successful for a few more years.
Alas.
Now we have WebAssembly (which resembles a stripped-down JVM from 25 years ago), and soon will be able to efficiently compile our favorite "real" language to run in the browser not through JavaScript.
They had to add scripting capabilities, and be first at it (else MS would be the first). They had to make the language instantly understandable by an average programmer — that is, someone who has a Basic / Pascal / C / Java / Perl background, and an hour of time to get acquainted and like the language.
So they created a scripting language with a familiar C-like syntax, very few restraints, and a bunch of "convenient" magic that helped a person to create a simple animation in the browser on their very first day, by mashing things together.
This was a terrible strategy to create a nice language for safe and comfortable development of large applications, especially full desktop applications 20 years from the inception date.
It was a very well-working strategy to get mass adoption in no time, and own the market the same year in the face of mighty competition. This is what business cared about, and this allowed Netscape to stay successful for a few more years.
Alas.
Now we have WebAssembly (which resembles a stripped-down JVM from 25 years ago), and soon will be able to efficiently compile our favorite "real" language to run in the browser not through JavaScript.