JavaScript is a language that's neither abstracted from the basic programming concepts nor its syntax is alien. Most of the people who picked it up can learn many other mainstream programming languages in a week, if not a weekend. Add 1-2 more weeks and they're writing GUI code.

Yet, they don't.

JavaScript is popular for pragmatic reasons (a.k.a. "it delivers results"), so is PHP. They aren't the best languages, but developers who choose them aren't simpletons who can't code in other languages.

I’d say electron became popular thanks to HTML, not JavaScript. IMO HTML is by far the “easiest” to use GUI framework because it is so unconstrained. It will end up a mess, but eventually you can get the result you want. This is not the case with native frameworks which come with a larger sets of rules on how they can be used.

I very much doubt that is a major reason. Language itself is rarely the issue, unless you're reusing code from other parts of the project (which many projects are, e.g. VS Code with Monaco).

I have spent far too much time on HN recently in related discussions.

Having access to libraries like React and its huge ecosystem is a big plus for productivity (example vs. Qt at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23154315).

Building custom UIs is also very easy with the flexibility that HTML provides (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23164595), even though it can be done with other technologies (and there are some examples of that).

> Qt is pretty good but QtQuick can be fairly barren in some areas i.e. if you want a embedded spreadsheet you're out of luck unless you make your own.

Hey, have you checked out https://github.com/ec1oud/spreadsheet.qml?