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Suppose I've been living under a rock this whole time and my knowledge of JS is something along `it's a language you use when you want a message box to appear a

Suppose I've been living under a rock this whole time and my knowledge of JS is something along `it's a language you use when you want a message box to appear and annoy your visitors`, i.e. completely out of touch. How could you explain me, strictly from the language design point, not practicality/how widespread it is/how easy is to find a job/etc, why JS? What are the strong points which make it a better language than lua/python/lisp/tcl/ruby? Thanks.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago
Well for client side code running on a website, it’s your only option. I guess nowadays many client support web assembly, but for all practical purposes you need to use JavaScript to do any client side web programming. On the server the advantage is much less clear-cut, but a lot of it boils down to “we want to use the same language for the front end and the backend“. Although in my experience this is actually a horrible idea, and tends to result in very messy code and lots of work arounds in practice. Anyway for me personally I continue to use JavaScript because of a combination of wanting to build lightly-interactive webpages and because that really is what the job market demands. So many companies are dead-set on hiring someone with node, react, and whatever other JavaScript experience. I tried taking it off my resume at one point because I kind of hate it, but if you’re at all involved in full stack web development it’ll really hurt your career if you don’t do JavaScript.