JavaScript

JavaScript is the programming language of the browser, created by Brendan Eich in ten days in 1995 as a lightweight scripting language for HTML documents. It has since become the most widely deployed programming language on Earth, not because it is well-designed but because it is the only language that can execute inside a browser without permission. JavaScript manipulates the DOM, fetches resources asynchronously, and assembles the interactive experiences that users mistake for the web itself. The language's flaws — its type coercion, its global namespace pollution, its callback hell — are forgiven because its deployment surface is universal. JavaScript is not the web's language of choice; it is the web's language of monopoly, and that monopoly has produced an ecosystem where every web page is a program that the user must execute blindly.