Douglas Crockford

Crockford spent years at Yahoo and elsewhere arguing that JavaScript contained a good language buried inside a bad one, and JavaScript: The Good Parts is that argument at about a hundred and seventy pages: use this subset, avoid the rest, and the language becomes worth defending. He specified JSON, which he says he discovered rather than invented, and put a licence clause on the reference implementation stating that the software shall be used for good, not evil. He has since written that the language should be replaced entirely, including by him.