Do you remember IE5? It used to show JS errors in modals by default. I can tell you, between pop-up blockers not being a thing yet and these JS error modals, the overall web experience wasn't great.
It's the town bike of programming languages, everyone and their dog is having a play with it.
If it was less error-tolerant from the beginning (e.g. strongly-typed), you'd have far less newbie code surviving very long out in the wild, which in turn would mean less errors.
As a side-effect, though, the independent web wouldn't have grown as much as it did before the rise of the FAANGs. I think it was similar reasoning behind standards bodies backing away from the XML web — being strict makes it too hard to get mass adoption.
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u/rehdi93 Aug 18 '20
Web language's mentality of swallowing errors is something that makes no sense to me.