I think you didn't read our FAQ or other site docs, and just assumed the worst. Why is that?
How do you pay publishers on sites that aren't partnered with you?
8. How do you use Bitcoin (BTC)?
We’re still developing the system, now entirely in the open source on github.com, but at this point we know we will use BTC only for permissionless payment delivery to user and publisher wallets that we will create using BitGo’s APIs. We hope to keep funds in BTC only in monthly payment buffers, to reduce effects of volatility. We intend to let expert users “bring their own BTC” to self-fund their wallets and auto-micropay for as much of their browsing as they like.
See also https://www.brave.com/blogpost_2.html which discusses user and publisher wallets. We'll have more in a week or two on the Brave Ledger payment system.
First-class function is not bad for 1995.
On the downside: Type coercion is always a bad idea. There is an inconsistency between built in types and user constructed types. It has terrible standard class libraries. It is verbose.
But I can name half a dozen other languages that suffer from these problems and more. Judicious use of a transpiler (like coffeescript) and choice of third party libraries will go a long way. Personally, I enjoy working in coffeescript more than Ruby specifically because of the first class functions.
Not the best programming language in the world, but not the worst either, IMHO. It's just unfortunate that some of the more obvious shortcomings weren't fixed early on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...
That all said, WebAssembly is potentially an avenue to break that monopoly, and I do give him credit for seeking to address the issue.
And despite being an (awful) plugin with an IDE that cost $600, Flash won in the pre-iPhone/V8 era.
They all started from a similar position, JS wasn't a standard from day one, there's a reason why it's emcascript today.
> And despite being an (awful) plugin with an IDE that cost $600, Flash won in the pre-iPhone/V8 era.
That's laughable, what percentage of the web ran on Flash in 2007, 1%?
No, Javascript had the huge advantage of being first; it's the only one on your list that both wasn't a plugin and was supported by IE and Netscape. And yes, modern Javascript is a better technology than any of those, although that's really damning with faint praise.
If Netscape Navigator 2 had shipped with, say, a Perl VM in addition to the Javascript VM, then I can guarantee you that everybody would've written their scripts in Perl instead of Javascript.
>That's laughable, what percentage of the web ran on Flash in 2007, 1%?
Back in the day, the only ways you could write a web app of any complexity/performance were to either use Flash or do it serverside (remember – not long ago! – when the new hot web technology was Ruby on Rails? Remember when it was PHP?). Flash was the only option if you wanted video (well, it or something truly evil like RealPlayer) or if you wanted a consistent and appealing look for your site.
Flash was on 56% of all websites as of 2010: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/04/05/http-archive-url...
Google trends for Flash vs. Javascript in the SF Bay Area: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02p97%2C%20%2...
It shows. JavaScript is fucking horrible, to put it mildly.
If you don't respect the founder of JavaScript and Mozilla, your standards are very high. I doubt many people commenting here would meet them.
There was already a better open-source web rendering engine and browser at the time. Maybe we'd've got a KHTML-based browser on Windows much sooner that would have filled the same role.
Mozilla is pretty cool I guess, JavaScript is pretty cool I guess. It's all really just whatever and I think he was very much in the right place at the right time for a lot of this, not that he isn't a brilliant man who's obviously far more accomplished than me.