I think you aren't quite understanding the point. It's not that some language wouldn't have dominated (in the interest of interoperability and functionality nee

I think you aren't quite understanding the point. It's not that some language wouldn't have dominated (in the interest of interoperability and functionality needs), but that it probably would have been a product by MS or some other homebrew language. Javascript being codified with the hackneyed ecmascript standard, was the death nell for efficiency in web apps for the last few decades. Without the standard, we probably would have seen a shift to other technologies (some of which would have failed like Silverlight) on emerging browsers, in hindsight.