I think a big standard library is a tradeoff question, but also, the standard available functionality is something I really like about Node. It's got map, filt

I think a big standard library is a tradeoff question, but also, the standard available functionality is something I really like about Node. It's got map, filter, reduce, just like all modern browsers, and it's also got nice and easy builtins for JSON parsing/dumping, HTTP serving, regular expressions, etc. And still the stdlib isn't bloated with lots of weird stuff, it's kind of nicely minimal. Not perfect at all, but in a pragmatic sense it's often very satisfactory. My real favorite language is Haskell, and that language is also both loved and hated, and one of the problems with it is the standard library. There's no regexps, no HTTP serving, no JSON, hell, people even import external dependencies to get convenient records. I'm kind of cynical and picky but tell me a language and I will give you a litany of horrible problems with it—really. Go's type system is stupid; Rust's compiler is slow and it's hard to learn; C is unsafe and has undefined behavior; C++ is a mess; Ruby is full of monkey patching; OCaml's syntax is idiosyncratic; Haskell has problems with laziness, records, the proliferation of language extension, an "im very smart" community, etc; Smalltalk is Unix-hostile and insular; Common Lisp is too mutable; Scheme is too fragmented; and so on and so on and so on. So I think of choosing a programming language as answering the question "Which horrible nightmare seems least awful for the particular thing I want to do right now?" and JavaScript is, for me, quite often a reasonable answer.