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Comment by sneakermoney

"The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1] resulting in something that was both inadequate for what people wanted to do and didn't evolve at a promising pace (likely because of said principles).

When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely. You can only do so much by strapping turbines on a camel (no offense to camels). At least we can actually write (mediocre) applications with HTML/CSS/JS now.

The other part of the mess is caused by the ever-growing amount of trend-hopping junior developers that want to try out new things - and their superiors letting them do it. If the foundation wasn't so bad, there would be less incentive to try and re-invent anything. Other platforms are fully market-driven, they didn't produce such a mess, because the market rewards stability (hence the low initial adoption rates of Python 3).

[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS-variables

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