I think it's important to keep some perspective here. JavaScript is a popular language for one major reason: for native front-end web development, it has effec

I think it's important to keep some perspective here. JavaScript is a popular language for one major reason: for native front-end web development, it has effectively been the only language. If you didn't want to use plug-ins, you were going to use JS. If you wanted to use some other language, it was going to be transpiled to JS. Node is also popular for one major reason: it's the same language that people who do front-end work already know, but running on the back-end. You can (mostly) use the same libraries on either side. You can take someone who's familiar with one side, and they can reasonably quickly be productive writing code for the other. None of this changes the fact that JavaScript is a very mediocre language by modern standards. Like many popular languages, it has improved over time, but like many popular languages that have been around for a while, it has a lot of fundamental warts that you can never fully escape. Neither does any of this change the fact that JavaScript's surrounding tool and library ecosystem is very mediocre by modern standards. The lack of stability, standardisation and longevity cripples progress and results in huge amounts of duplicated or otherwise wasted effort. This is partly a cultural thing, and partly due to technical limitations in a language that was never designed for programming in the large but is now being pressed into service in that role. JavaScript is the language of the moment because web development is the high profile field of the moment, but don't let the blog posts fool you. Enthusiastic but often inexperienced developers working in JavaScript write as if everything else is somehow old-fashioned and out-of-date, yet many ideas hailed as radical advances in the JS community have been absolutely routine in most of the programming world for decades. There are plenty of people getting on with doing useful work -- often much more productively -- using those oh so horrible, old-fashioned, out-of-date tools. They just don't need to shout from the rooftops that they now have a standard way to import code from one file and call it from another one, or to combine code from multiple files but strip out parts that are never used to keep the size of the output down, or to separate input, output and data processing, because the rest of the world was learning these lessons in the 1970s and 1980s. :-)