JavaScript was definitely designed for web development. Though, at the time web development meant a tiny bit of magic in an otherwise static html document.

I wouldn’t call “animating a piece of text” on a HTML page as “web development.

16 bit home computers could do this better 10 years before JS.

The crucial distinguishing factor is that JS was made to animate a bit of text... on every device in existence, past present or future. That's the biggest difference between the web and native.

The "every device in existence" fails with node, at example, which has a different standard library, and every browser support libraries and even syntax differently (which is why we backport stuff with tools like babel)

I can only guess but, I think the parent means web development in the context of an HTTP server. (GET/POST/etc).

Most of Ruby's life has been dedicated to web development.

The original use-case at birth of a language matters less, as programming languages are living things that evolve and mature, sometimes morphing into very different things than they were at the beginning.

Likewise Rust's current lifespan has almost entirely been dedicated to taking on C/C++ and their use-cases in systems programming and server applications. That's all that really matters here.

No, because PHP was not designed at all, it was just a hack that solved some problems and started to evolve. Anyway, web development in '95 is not the same thing as today.

Your statement would pretty much also be true if you substituted Javascript for PHP.

Language design does not end with the release of the first version.

> nor even JavaScript itself was designed for web development

Javascript was designed for web development of the 90s. It evolved along with web development.