JavaScript, child of Scheme

As I've often said, and as others at Netscape can confirm, I was recruited to Netscape with the promise of "doing Scheme" in the browser. At least client engineering management including Tom Paquin, Michael Toy, and Rick Schell, along with some guy named Marc Andreessen, were convinced that Netscape should embed a programming language, in source form, in HTML. So it was hardly a case of me selling a "pointy-haired boss" -- more the reverse.

Whether that language should be Scheme was an open question, but Scheme was the bait I went for in joining Netscape. Previously, at SGI, Nick Thompson had turned me on to SICP.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/04/

Your God. Where is Him now?

If Brenden had come out with Javascript (1994) just 10 years earlier, we would never have been stuck with the legacy of how far Perl(1987) set back web scripting. And how on earth did people go for PHP (1995) when JS was available. Can you imagine if Brenden came out with JS 20 years earlier the same time as csh (C shell, 1978)? How on earth Bill Joy thought that csh looked anything like C is beyond me.