According to stories I heard from people who were in the room, the W3C was on the verge of adopting Tcl as the preferred browser scripting language, when Java s

According to stories I heard from people who were in the room, the W3C was on the verge of adopting Tcl as the preferred browser scripting language, when Java suddenly and unexpectedly got popular and Netscape decided they could use it as a network system language to challenge Microsoft. JavaScript came shortly afterwards, developed and named purely for marketing reasons to bolster Java uptake. Then came Microsoft's ever-so-slightly incompatible Jscript, and the next ten years of web history was a fight to see who could lock the most web developers in the trunk. No room for alternative languages in that scenario.