There is indeed very little new under the sun. A lot of stuff are just repackaging of old ideas. I remembered reading the Self language paper and thought it was cool as heck, objects all the way, no classes. Then later Javascript came along with its prototype and people thought it's the shit. I was like, whatever, it has been done before.
If I remember correctly Brendan Eich was originally promised that he could build Self for Netscape, but later due to various reasons had to change the syntax and all that.
Also the popularity of javascript in the geekdom is in my recollection fairly recent phenomenon. It became interesting only after ajax, before that it was a leper like php.
