Actually I think it was created at a time where it was used very sparingly and had very limited scope. The joke used to be that the average javascript program i

Actually I think it was created at a time where it was used very sparingly and had very limited scope. The joke used to be that the average javascript program is one line. I don't know if that was ever exactly true but a lot of early javascript was on inline event attributes (think "onclick" and the like). For that use a forgiving scripting language is a good fit. What changed is what javascript, and the web, is used for. Embedded Java and Flash showed that there was an appetite for the web to do more and the security problems involved with those technologies showed they weren't a good fit. Javascript was adapted to fill that void by default as it was the only language that every browser could agree on using.