In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet

JavaScript, which runs on an estimated 98.9 percent of all websites globally, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its initial announcement. The programming language originated from a joint press release issued by Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems in May 1995, following an intensive 10-day sprint by Netscape engineer Brendan Eich who developed the foundational working prototype. Netscape intended the design to be a lightweight scripting tool that would appeal to web designers and non-professional programmers, allowing them to add interactive elements to webpages. JavaScript quickly grew past its browser origins and now consistently ranks among the most widely used languages in the world, powering mobile applications, server infrastructure, desktop software, and embedded systems.

Headline has a serious case of "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps" syndrome. What runs the internet today is completely different from the "hack" and more than at least 1 Netscape employee worked on it and its modern iterations.

Well, in fairness to the headline, all of the bad parts of Javascript introduced in those 10 days are still there.

> appeal to web designers and non-professional programmers

Similar to COBOL and SQL - designed to be "accessible" by oversimplifying things and ended up being more complicated to actually use than better tools.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146406