&gt; <i>Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion.</i><p>This did not happen thanks to Unix; if anything, you&#x27;d probably have to be grateful to Microsoft and Apple for introducing OSes that were end-user-usable. There&#x27;s a reason the &quot;year of Linux on Desktop&quot; never happened and is always one year from now.<p>The point of The Unix-Haters Handbook, which also applies very much to modern web is that the so-called &quot;advancement&quot; didn&#x27;t really bring anything new. It reinvented old things - things we knew how to do right - but in a broken way, full of half-assed hacks that got fossilized because everything else depends on it.<p>&gt; <i>And really, almost all of it could&#x27;ve happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn&#x27;t been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know where you&#x27;re getting that from, but it&#x27;s probably a good opportunity to remind you that JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme <i>twice</i>, both time it didn&#x27;t happen because Netscape wanted a Java-looking solution <i>right fucking now</i> to compete first with Java, and then with Microsoft, and somehow no-one thought to pause for the moment and maybe do it right.<p>(Also don&#x27;t blame Lisp community for the fact that companies reinvented half of Lisp in XML. Rather ask yourself why most programmers think the history of programming is a linear progression of power from Assembler and C, and why they remain ignorant of anything that happened before ~1985.)<p>JavaScript got a bad rep because a) it was terribly broken (less so now), and b) because of all the stupid stuff people were writing in it those 15 years ago. But the current problems of the Web are not really the fault of JavaScript, but of the community moving forward at the speed of typing, without stopping for a second and thinking if those layers on layers on layers of complexity are actually needed or useful. Simple landing pages are now built on frameworks that are more complex than what we used to call &quot;Enterprise Edition&quot; 10 years ago.