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If anything, Javascript suffered because it had large corporations invested in it. The guys at PUC-Rio were never beholden to corporate sponsors as far as I kno

• outworlder 12y ago
  That may be true. But without corporate backing, we wouldn't have had so many amazing implementations, which helped with the adoption. Even if Lua (or Lua-JIT) can still beat the crap out of them sometimes. Back then there wasn't even a contest.
• BrendanEich 12y ago
  Why does corporate sponsorship have anything to do with it? Any browser that gained non-trivial market share would have felt the same "don't break the web, or you lose market share" pain that the bigs felt. KHTML only started getting adoption via the Safari fork because Dave Hyatt and others implemented real-world quirks (e.g., residual style), prior to webkit.org. Gecko had the benefit of `if (document.all) { IE code here } else { Netscape code here }` patterns from the '90s, but we had to add quirks to gain share with Firefox (m/b, then Phoenix) in 2002 and onward: innerHTML, undetected document.all emulation, and of course XHR. Corporations have nothing to do with it. Any evolving ecosystem with a huge corpus of popular content begets terrific selection pressure against breaking backward compatibility.