Been watching Timeless (the series) on Netflix and can't help playing with the idea that they would go back to 1995 and prevent @BrendanEich from inventing JavaScript. Maybe browsers would now be using a sensible language?

Perhaps Smalltalk? I heard it was considered but in the end it all boiled down to licensing fees

Smalltalk could have been one, it surely was stable at the time, but there was also a lot of other promising languages released as that time, like Lua for example

Fortunately, there are transpilers (</irony>)

Don't get me started... :D

Smalltalk was never a candidate for Netscape, but it influenced Java directly & JS via Self. Lua wasn’t a candidate either, but flash-freezing 1995 Lua would have have led to even more bitter results. Lua incompatibly evolved. It was JS, or else VBScript if I missed Netscape 2.