Ironically, the author defines the primary aspect of his life's work as the desire to: > transform JavaScript into a secure language, which is part of my plan

Ironically, the author defines the primary aspect of his life's work as the desire to: > transform JavaScript into a secure language, which is part of my plan to transform the web into a safe platform for mashups, advertising, and commerce. My memory of the early internet business days was that it was specifically advertising and commerce that held back Javascript for about a decade. AOL would not ship a Javascript capable browser because they thought they could monopolize the entire internet by sending "free 100 hours of internet" CDs in the mail and every magazine. Monopolization of internet technologies was such a good idea that Microsoft then decided to try to do the same thing, and also not implement Javascript properly because they didn't own and charge a license fee for it. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, the reason for the rise of PHP back in the early internet days was as a server-side rendered replacement for browser scripting was the poor state of Javascript engines. If you take the logic away from the AOLs and Microsofts of the world, then they can't break your complicated, interactive website while bickering with each other by breaking things on purpose. The lure of writing things in PHP was that it spit out raw HTML separately from a browser, and HTML was the only thing everyone agreed on. In short, Javascript might have gotten along farther, faster than it did, if more people had been more concerned with building a better mousetrap than building "advertising and commerce."