Popularity can be measured many ways. IEEE is way more insular than the JS community. IEEE members are much more likely to be dealing with lower-level code and/

Popularity can be measured many ways. IEEE is way more insular than the JS community. IEEE members are much more likely to be dealing with lower-level code and/or statistical analysis. JS isn't low-level and doesn't have a very good statistical analysis suite. In contrast, with Python, you use numpy with C/C++ to do most of your work in that area. Are there more people writing that kind of code or more people wiring together consumer-facing stuff? Obviously the latter. Likewise, the number of people searching for "Javascript" is meaningless for several reasons. There are loads of searches that would use other names like "JS" or "React" or "HTML File API" that should count, but don't and aren't easily added to that metric. In addition, there isn't much need to google for JS itself. The best sources to learn JS are free and once you find them, you don't need to continue searching. JS is a much simpler language with a smaller builtin library than Java, so even a junior dev with a few months of experience will do far less googling about the language than a similar junior Java dev. In addition, the Java dev will be googling "Java X builtin" while the JS dev will be googling "Lodash X" instead. Search result aren't great resources for that kind of analysis. It's not an illusion that JS is popular. Applescript moving to JS. VBscript moving to JS. Qt, GTK, and others baking in first-class support for JS (complete with JS engines). Duktape, Jerryscript, or XS7 in the microcontroller and embedded scripting space. Even things like PDF have JS baked into them. Then there's web-apps, react-native apps, electron, node, etc. If you look at the computers in someone's house, there's a very good chance they don't have Python anywhere. There's even a decent chance that they don't have Java installed (and an even better one that they have Java from years ago if they do). You won't find even one of them that doesn't have JS being used every day. If that's not popularity, I don't know what could be.