I was talking to someone recently who likened it to a shifting pendulum. For a while, he told me, terminal control languages were sufficiently complex that you

I was talking to someone recently who likened it to a shifting pendulum. For a while, he told me, terminal control languages were sufficiently complex that you could send a program to run _on the terminal_, and then things shifted back to running things where you store them on the server. Now there's HTML5 and javascript, the world's most complicated terminal control language.