>Who "fights against the language itself" today? It is true that now, 22 years after JavaScript emerged as a toy language to allow people to do simple UI trick

>Who "fights against the language itself" today? It is true that now, 22 years after JavaScript emerged as a toy language to allow people to do simple UI tricks like creating alert boxes, and 8 years after people started trying to shoehorn it into the backend for GCool Points, JS has finally started to adopt some useful features. ES6+ address most of the glaring omissions, and writing a script in JS/Node now doesn't feel too much different than writing a script in Python or Ruby (though much more build infrastructure is required; JavaScript is anything but native outside of the browser). Bolting on those features that have been available in other languages for much longer is a big accomplishment from the ECMAScript people, so props to them. But there are still many instances of people "fighting the language" in the practical sense (the sense that matters). Two main exhibits: Node's "harmony" feature release model that requires the VM to be run with certain flags to enable certain syntax (much worse than Python's `from __future__` model) as well as Babel's entire existence and widespread usage. I don't know how often you use other languages, but JavaScript is the only platform where I have to run my code through a chain of slow, third-party transformers just to use simple language features like constants with confidence. Separately, the standard lib is bare and implementations remain inconsistent, requiring everything to be built on struts like lodash and jQuery (with tons of random dangling accouterments pulled from random GitHub repos, a la `left-pad`) that paper over JS's major pain points and general impracticality. Other scripting languages have convenience libraries and wrappers, even alternative implementations, but nothing else goes to the extremes we see in npm, where it's quite common to pull in single convenience functions as libraries. While these things may not be quite fighting the "language" from the stringent academic perspective of the ECMAScript spec, they do represent practical constraints on virtually all real-world use. Just as you'd be crazy to try to use JavaScript without jQuery back in the day, you'd be crazy to use it now without the huge amalgam of crap people have developed (babel, lodash, webpack, yarn, etc.) because they are so inexplicably committed to shoving the square peg of JS through the round hole of server-side programming.