> IMO, it accomplishes this not as much by being good, as by being a parasite that infects web browsers.
My memory is a bit foggy, but I recall Microsoft throwing a bunch of things at the browser in the beginning. You can specify the language in the script tag. VBScript anyone?
It wasn't like JavaScript didn't have competition ... it just won a very long time ago.
In my memory, JavaScript won because it had market penetration, it did not get market penetration because it won.
It had market penetration because it was included with Netscape Navigator.
Yes, it also was good enough at that time, but almost anything would have been, in a time where a ten-line script was huge. I do not think that it would have won against say VBScript if the latter would have been available on the same set of browsers.
Microsoft threw one other language into Internet Explorer, and as far as I can recall didn't push it any harder than JavaScript. No other scripting language was ever implemented in any other browser. To call VBScript a competitor is being overly generous. JavaScript was really the only option for DHTML.
Yes, that is tongue-in-cheek, but without JavaScript, web browsers would have found another language; without web browsers, JavaScript would long have been forgotten.