Life in the trenches did not match the fancy vision and inspiration of the marketing quotes gathered in the article. Most users resorted to four-letter explicatives of Anglo-Saxon origin to capture how they felt about the language.<p>I remember the "joy" of trying to get a program to work consistently across multiple browsers and vendors. It was frustrating and obnoxious. The arrival of the ECMAscript standard in 1997 helped, but for years I always tried to code as little JavaScript as possible and code as simply as possible just to avoid possible and/or known problems in the implementations.<p>Incidentally, for a good read, look at Doug Crockford's <i>JavaScript: the good parts</i> which reveals the lovely little language hidden inside JavaScript.