I personally don't like that Javascript has had to have a ton of work done on it to get it to the point of other languages that were better at their first release. It was just a ton of time spent on something that was weak to begin with.
If Javascript were better at the beginning, and this same effort was spent on it, it probably would be ruling the world, front and back-end, and be a really good language with great tooling around it.
There was a great amount of debate about nulls being a billion dollar mistake, but Javascript probably beats it in monetary damages by far.
I like it, some dont. I get it. All I ask is to not dismiss it.
Folks new to programming find these edge cases as a reason to not learn it. That irks me.
Some of us value our time and would like to improve our discipline. In other fields it's called being professional. It's a shame we care so little about it.
So, what would be different about that? JavaScript does rule the world, front (definitely) and back-end (arguably, but there aren't a lot of contenders for the language that's more popular for new projects).
They both more or less accidentally became popular. None of them were very well designed. They both lacked type safety.
Unlike php though javascript became not only popular but it actually ended up being the only alternative.
Most languages had major design flaws. Rubyists will gladly complain about how OO is bolted on in Python, Python users will gladly talk about how slow Ruby's interpreter was and how god awfully complex the syntax is. Both of them have limitations in their runtimes and are actually catching up to JS in some areas (see Python's adoption of async).
We can talk about how baroque CL is or how much Java sucked in 1995, how massively complex C++ is, etc, etc. Those arguments have been made for decades, though. JS is no worse than most languages in various ways, but people are pissed off because their chosen language isn't as popular.
Maybe that's a cynical point of view, but these criticisms never get past the most superficial concerns, so it's not obvious why people really care so much.
The features which make a language rise rapidly might just be different to the features that make a language "good".
PHP in particular is amazing for getting started at speed. I remember taking a HTML file and popping in a couple of lines of PHP in the middle. I still haven't found anything anywhere near that easy for making a server backed website.
If that's already your web server, anyway.
I agree, it sucks that js the only alternative in some cases. But hey, imagine if Java was the only alternative!
