I don't see the problem with s-expressions? It would be a nice symmetry - pointy brackets for markup, round ones for code. Eich have stated that he intended to

I don't see the problem with s-expressions? It would be a nice symmetry - pointy brackets for markup, round ones for code. Eich have stated that he intended to create something like scheme for the web. The Java-inspired syntax (and name) were chosen for marketing reasons, not technical reasons. He couldn't just have used scheme wholesale though, since a major part of JS is the integration with the DOM. He would have needed to create some custom object system anyway to support that. So it would have been a new language anyway, and due to the time constraints at the time, it would probably have had the same amount of bugs and mistakes that JS ended up with.