JavaScript is not a fantastic language. It does a lot of things that make no sense. It converts between types in nonsensical ways. Eg in Ruby, you can't accidentally do `5 + "hi"` and get "5hi". If you really want to treat the number as a string, you can do `5.to_s + "hi"` and it works, but you don't do such crap accidentally.

In JavaScript, `4 / "cake"` returns `NaN`, which is sensible, but if I wanted to check whether I just accidentally did a bad division, `(4 / "cake") === NaN` will lie to me.

There are LOTS of quirks like this. JS is like a floor with boards missing all over the place. Yes, if you've walked on it every day for years, you've already stepped in every hole and know where they are. But that doesn't make it a good floor.

A good language is consistent. JS is not.

The fact that it now has fast implementations has nothing to do with it. This car goes 300mph, but don't use the left turn signal on Tuesdays because that sucker will blow you up.

Totally agree. The lack of understanding of JavaScript's paradigm from some people make them blind about the language power, it has the enough amount of every needed paradigm there, including OOP, functional and evented. I see in the comments here people complaining about things like dynamic `this` when they just don't understand it's one of the biggest powers of JS.

I think we are exaggerating here. Javascript was terrible but with es6 it's just getting better, I know various languages and only Javascript manages to make me scream with its quirks, the others at most I feel disappointed. So "good" is an exaggeration, reasonable seems fine, but currently is either an OOP language where 'this' changes every time, or a functional language without native support for immutability, curried functions by default and a whole bunch of utilities that you expect from a language claiming to be functional. If it's a language with both mixed, must be compared to ruby which has consistent oop and functional programming with support for laziness and a super powerful ability to create dsl.

And in Javascript, it's still a nightmare importing a file. You either have a or you are on nodejs.

Elm is client side only.

Honestly from the programmer's perspective, it's really just one framework: .NET. I know that .NET abstracts away other frameworks such as the Win32 API, but generally you don't need to know any Win32 API etc. to make a Winforms / WPF / etc. application. With modern "web application" style development, it seems these days you need to know multiple frameworks by default, for better or for worse.

More to the point, .NET was designed from the get go as an enterprise programming language. The web was not designed from the beginning to be a universal application platform, it was designed to display formatted hyperlinked text. Much of the hack-y feel of today's web development -- as well as other aspects such as the rather poor security -- springs from this. If the web were designed from the get-go to be a universal sandboxed application platform, I feel that many things (ranging from the scripting language choice to the DOM model) would have looked a lot different today. Standard, non interactive HTML + CSS (what the web was designed for) certainly doesn't feel too hacky after all.

You still need to use Express or something similar on the server side for Javascript, I mean, if we are talking about standard procedures here. Plus with React, you are still doing that Javascript/CSS thingy and HTML of course at some point, so there is no avoiding that, and clearfixes, polyfills, etc, etc.

Maybe I'm missing something, but that looks like SQL Injection ready to happen.

That looks fantastic, I'll take that any day over an ORM in JS.

Oh, it goes so much further down than that.