Surely you know the saying about what happens when you ass-u-me.
But hey, if that's the tone you'd like to set, then I'm happy to oblige...
> I can also see that your comment fails to address the meat of mine
There was no meat to yours. "Python is good for scientific uses because reasons and JS is not because reasons; also, here are some cheap shots at JS being a weekend project despite there having been literal decades of work since Brendan Eich invented it". That's the sort of drivel I'd expect from novices using tribalism as a substitute for an informed opinion, not someone who claims to have sufficient expertise in programming to competently educate someone else.
> I love Perl, but explaining how $ and @ work differently given the point of usage is annoying, and if I taught Perl all day every day, it'd be a continuous annoyance.
Explaining to beginners why their programs break if they don't get indentation perfectly right strikes me as no less of a continuous annoyance.
On that note, Ruby lacks either of those issues. Same with Lua. Same with Javascript.
> ANYBODY who can type and read English can learn to become effective with it
That's true of pretty much every scripting language out there; that's indeed what usually sets scripting languages apart from systems languages.
> it blows every competitor out of the water by a large margin with regards to getting from Point A to Point B as a novice programmer
Not every competitor. It's one of a category of languages which novices in significant numbers successfully learn reasonably quickly - and significant numbers of novices do become successful with Ruby or Lua or - yes - JS just as quickly as novices do with Python.
> I mean this in the nicest way possible: I've probably spent more time teaching and training people who weren't programmers to write good programs then you've spent programming throughout your life.
I mean this in the nicest way possible: if your comments here are representative of your teaching and training of others, then you owe your students refunds and apologies. I would hope that you don't teach your students blatant misinformation like JS being merely a weekend project (as if Python wasn't?) or fanboyishly insist that "Python will always win eventually" as if programming is all about winners and losers rather than using the right tool for the job. If you do teach your students such, then they are worse off for it, and deserve someone who actually educates rather than misinforms.
If you're as good a teacher as you claim to be, then the language doesn't matter; the differences between the various scripting languages out there are minute in comparison to the fundamental concepts like "how do I write and call functions?" or "how do I store data and use it later?".
Likewise, to your average non-programmer, the language doesn't matter. What matters is the path of least resistance between "I need to do this thing" and "I have done this thing". Sometimes that's Python. Sometimes that's JS. Hell, sometimes that's something totally bonkers like Haskell. Python is one of several paths of least resistance for scientists in particular not because of anything to do with the language itself, but rather because of a library and tooling ecosystem that formed around it by happenstance; no reason why that couldn't happen for JS, or any other scripting language.
