I've talked and written recently about why "just pick[ing] up Lua or Python" was...

DRANK

I've talked and written recently about why "just pick[ing] up Lua or Python" was not an option, but there are other strong reasons that was not in the cards.Think about what mid-1990s Lua and Python were like, how much they needed to change in incompatible ways. The web browsers would never have tolerated that -- you'd get a fly-in-amber-from-1995-or-1996 version of Python or Lua, forced into a standards body such as Ecma (then ECMA), and then evolved slowly _a la_ ECMA-262 editions 2, 3, and (much later, after the big ES4 fight) edition 5.Interoperation is hard, extant C Python and Lua runtimes were OS-dependent and as full of security holes, if not more full, than JS in early browsers, and yet these languages and others such as Perl were also destined to evolve rapidly in their virtuously-cycling open source communities, including server-side Linux and the BSDs (also games, especially in Lua's case -- Python too, but note the forking if not fly-in-amber effects: Stackless Python in …