JavaScript creator Brendan Eich has spoken out against the perception that JavaScript was an arbitrary or random success. In a comment at Hacker News Eich explains the historical context from which JavaScript emerged and how it was unlikely to have happened any other way.
In comment at Lambda the Ultimate, Eich wrote: “History has reason and rhyme as well as chance, it is not all and only random. For my part, there was little ‘arbitrary’ in what I did, including the mistakes — some of those weirdly recapitulated early LISP mistakes.”