I think OP meant it as browsers that run JS. The built in console is so useful for testing/practice. You can run JS without any setup on most popular OS - Win/Linux/Mac.
You can practice JS in console while viewing YouTube tutorial or following a JS blog/ Mozilla dev page.
Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.
But the difference was that you could also create proper applications with a UI, a database and (optionally!) some glue code.
We just had no good way of distributing our apps. Creating anything collaborative that wasn't restricted to a local network was exceedingly difficult as well.
The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.
And if you're asking me why the number of developers exploded while the barriers to entry supposedly went up, my answer is that the new opportunities that came with unrestricted worldwide distribution of software trumped the narrower issue of writing that software in the first place.
Can't be everyone, how do you know the numbers? How many Office users actually used VB? MS famously stifled competition in internet browsers. 1990s numbers still won't give a fair picture.
>The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.
Why blame the web for higher barrier to entry. JS is doing fine. See a few surveys for popular languages: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...
JS didn't lower the barrier to programming at all. On the contrary, programming with VisualBasic and SQL was 10 times more accessible and productive than web development. What enabled millions to write software was the availability of computers in every household.
What the Web did was revolutionise software distribution. After making a change to my 1990s style VB program I had to pack a stack of floppy disks and travel to my customer to install the new version on their PCs, migrate the data, make sure everything still worked in spite of other programs installing an overlapping set of DLLs, etc.
With the Web, we took a massive hit in terms of developer productivity and complexity, but the distribution model trumped absolutely everything. It also made things possible that would have been completely unthinkable, such as running software made by a large number of developers you don't know and don't necessarily trust with all your data.
To this day, the Web is the only reasonably secure runtime environment that isn't centrally controlled by some gatekeeper with its own agenda.
So I actually agree with most of what you have said elsewhere in this thread. But I disagree about lowering the barrier for developers.