There is not a single feature in JS you can't find elsewhere, often better implemented.
If anything, the vast majority of scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PHP...) have more features than JS.
JS is so lacking in features that half of its ecosystem is dedicated to compensate for that (typescript, babel, webpack, undersacore...).
Yet one feature does not a language make. A language is the whole of it's behavior, and JS is a perfectly fine solution with a wide mix of good features.
Is it the fastest? No. The most performant? Not close. Does it have the best ability to write language parsers? No!
But it's not supposed to. It's a general purpose language that's well suited for a wide swath of cases.
Most languages have transpilers and utility libraries - and those are useful tools but also not meant to be part of a language. Even python has dozens of compilation tools depending on how you intend to distribute your code.
It's the mark of a poor intelligence that buys on pros only without considering cons. We must weigh not only our features but how well the average engineer can use it, how quickly we can produce features and how safe our code is, and how easily we can actually hire and train engineers.
JS is one of the most popular languages in the world. My 10 year old nephew can write it and do a decent job of it.
JS is a fine language. It doesn't really bring anything new/different to the table (other than prototype inheritance, but that doesn't amount to much IMO), so the real differentiating factor is that it has a privileged position because of browsers.
Very dishonest take btw.
Here's a forum of people who could tell you why they use JS instead of your $favelang, yet instead of trying to figure it out, you just assume everyone is lazy or a junior dev except for you.
You should be a little more suspicious of convenient little truths like that where you're the cool elite engineer protagonist and everyone else is a bumbling idiot.
I use JS on the server. Any questions for me?
So for the rare cases where async does matter (and they are a niche, given even big names like facebook code behind async proxy and do long polling), there are still little reason to choose JS.
I can't think of a single mission where, if I were not being forced to use it, I would chose it over something else. And I say that while coding a LOT of JS all year long. Even training people regularly in the language.
I double down on my initial statement, if tomorrow JS is removed from the browser, it would die in a few years.
It's a badly designed language that has been accumulated fixes over the years to make it acceptable while never removing what's bad. It was so initially bad that half the ecosystem of JS exists to not code in JS (typescript, coffeescript, babel, jsx, webpack...).
And it has received that much of attention because we had no choice. Google spent millions to make a technical marvel of a JIT to run it at decent speed.
Any tech that would have had half the resources poured into it would today be the incarnation of skynet.
It's a language surviving on artificial life support than can do so because it has the best blackmail game of all time.
Java?
I also didn't say everyone is lazy. I said a lot of developers.
Most people here do not belong to that use-case. As they are mostly here by interest and are willing to learn.
But most people, after work, don't do anything with their knowledge.
And are more willing to learn node as it's the same on the backend + frontend.
Or keep using what they already know, with no interest for other languages.
