There are definitely trends, but the pattern I see with early JS and PHP is they simply didn't anticipate the consequences of certain decisions. What happens i

There are definitely trends, but the pattern I see with early JS and PHP is they simply didn't anticipate the consequences of certain decisions. What happens is you make a decision "locally", for some use case or program. And then you don't realize how it affects other programs. The well known "Wat" talk about JS by Gary B. is basically a bunch of these unintended consequences. So the problem is really to see the whole picture, and to get some experience using the language. But there's that catch 22 -- by the time you release it, it's almost set in stone. I remember in the early 2000's Guido and the Python team would always refer to "Python 3000" -- the one chance they had to break things!