Out of interest, was Tcl considered? It's the original embeddable language.

In 1994 at the second WWW conference we presented "An API to Mosaic". It was TCL embedded inside the (only![1]) browser at the time - Mosaic. The functionality available was substantially similar to what Javascript ended up providing. We used it in our products especially for integrating help and preferences - for example HTML text could be describing color settings, you could click on one, select a colour from the chooser and the page and setting in our products would immediately update. In another demo we were able to print multiple pages of content from the start page, and got a standing ovation! There is an alternate universe where TCL could have become the browser language.

For those not familiar with TCL, the C API is flavoured like main. Callbacks take a list of strings argv style and an argc count. TCL is stringly typed which sounds bad, but the data comes from strings in the HTML and script blocks, and the page HTML is also text, so it fits nicely and the C callbacks are easy to write.

[1] Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released the week before

Wasn't the original Redis prototype written in Tcl?