Imagine that you have a furniture factory. There is one room where one guy who works for you produces tables. In next room there is another who produces sofas.

Imagine that you have a furniture factory. There is one room where one guy who works for you produces tables. In next room there is another who produces sofas. And then another one who makes chairs. The demand is great, so routinely you hire more people to produce more things. As you walk, you realise that each of them uses selection of screws and chisels and screws and wheels, and types of wood and door handles and all of them are somehow different. Not because they have to be, but because they were acquired independently by each worker. You come with an idea that if you standardise on some set of commonly used wheels and handles and chisels. This means you will need less of them, it will be easier for each worker to acquire, reuse and combine them, less time spend relearning different tools and a lot more other benefits. Once you did that, you may realise that the things built on top of that - like drawers, doors, covers - can benefit from the same standardisation. And so you do and keep improving your factory. Notice however that such idea would never come from single worker. So JS is stuck at being early-stage factory. Main thing that it lacks is a boss that looks at it and improves it. Any proposed change has to gather momentum, convince some committee and even than it takes years to push it. It takes so much effort that most of the time anyone who tries just gives up. Where in other languages its enough to send complain email and propose a solution to one mailing list to get someone involved and get proposed change deployed in the next release a month later, you can't do it with js. For the same reason there is nobody to make a sweeping change and wipe this disaster from earth. Too much politics involved. So everyone hack his way around it, and hacks are not very maintainable, so you'll need to redo them on next project, but very differently. Making any two projects incompatible and hard to build one on top of another. Java had its Sun, Python had BDFL Guido, JS has no such thing.