There are interviews to Eich and Zawinski in the "Coders at Work" book that tell a lot about the context were Javascript was developed. They are very interesting, and that book is almost obligatory read to anyone interested in the history and current state of sofware development.
Crockford is also interviewed there and asked about language subsetting and the thinking behind Javascript: The Good Parts.
I wouldn't doubt they could win if it came to issues in JS. The problems I've seen with JS are real. Like implicit semicolon insertion just seems like a really bad idea.
People who disparage JS aren't attacking Eich -- in fact I'd hope Eich would agree that semicolon insertion is a mistake in retrospect (but if not, I'd love to know why). But as users of a language we can react to inadequacies we see in the langauge, even if we couldn't necessarily design a better one from scratch.
With that said, I feel like a dynamic scripting language makes sense. As an application language, I'd personally prefer a statically typed language, but that's an argument that no one will win (from either side).
The problem with implicit semicolon insertion is that (1) the rules for it are too complicated and (2) it's called "semicolon insertion", which makes it sound stupid. Lots of other languages — FORTRAN, Ruby, Python, Tcl, BASIC, sh, LOGO — use line breaks to separate statements without the problems that come from JS's too-clever semicolon-insertion rules.
As much as I love JavaScript, I can't help but curse the Date object every time I have to do something other than just instantiate the current local time and print it out.
Most successful people benefit more from "dumb luck" than they ever realize. But what makes most of them successful is their ability to take advantage of and benefit from random occurrences.
Yes. My thoughts exactly. I recall seeing different incarnations of this "evolving story", so it inspired me to whip up this quick, lame flowchart of my understanding of the timeline that lead to this post on RWW: http://www.gliffy.com/publish/2805751/
Crockford is also interviewed there and asked about language subsetting and the thinking behind Javascript: The Good Parts.