How did they manage to build the entire modern Web on a language without a standard library?
> on a language without a standard library? Because the other languages & with bigger runtimes and more comprehensive standard libraries such as Java applets, Microsoft Silverlight, Macromedia Flash that were promoted for browsers to create "rich fat clients" were ultimately rejected for various reasons. The plugins had performance problems, security problems, browser crashes, etc. Java applets was positioned by Sun…
Java's Date standard lib was awful for 2 decades, so there's no guarantee that a big standard library is a good standard library.