Gruber’s reaction to Hacker News Discussion on Shubham Bose’s ‘The 49MB Web Page’:
One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs.
It’s hard to imagine the web without JavaScript, only as a collection of static, linked documents served by essentially passive file servers.