It's an illusion. I think this is just one of the rare examples where people can't arbitrarily roll their own new language because they're unhappy with bits an

It's an illusion. I think this is just one of the rare examples where people can't arbitrarily roll their own new language because they're unhappy with bits and pieces of C++ or Python. Consider that in the same span of time we have kotlin, groovy, scala, elixir, erlang, r, go, rust, swift, etc., as well as many yearly flavors of C++. Its just that every time someone makes one of these it fractures the total attention paid to the the langauge/framework so they tend to become niche and peter out. Javascript, on the other hand, is 1) profitable and 2) chosen because no matter what you really cant† choose a different language to do this work in the browser. This has the effect of concentrating all work in a very specific place. Image if instead of some people writing ruby, go, java, etc. you combined all of their equivalents of npm into one giant thing that everyone worked on all the time. I think it would look very similar to npm. Oh and don't forget that framework development is not only driven by new engineering practices and concepts, but by new features that get added by Mozilla and Google like async/await and OffscreenCanvas. There's just much, much more to whole ecosystem when you're dealing with modern javascript than really any other language. Also, Javascript is just LISP in C-style clothing so you also end up drastically different programming styles (take, for example d3's style versus jquery versus react versus three.js: all valid, all quite different and with different requirements like webpack.) This maps rather directly to when people made scala and groovy, imo. They're just like JSX/ES6+ but we consider them all different languages as opposed to "lots of javascript." † even here there are some attempts to do this with typescript and rust that compile to restricted javascripts.