Bringing up Javascript really doesn't help your argument as it is pretty universally deemed a "poorly designed language". Many, many people have written about

Bringing up Javascript really doesn't help your argument as it is pretty universally deemed a "poorly designed language". Many, many people have written about this. Somewhat randomly selected is this: https://medium.com/javascript-non-grata/javascript-is-a-dysfunctional-programming-language-a1f4866e186f https://medium.com/javascript-non-grata/javascript-is-a-dysf... (and it references more). Later ECMAScript editions have made good improvements, but there are still plenty of sharp edges and footguns in Javascript which simply do not need to exist. Javascript is a leading language because _practically_ speaking (not strictly speaking) it is the only language you can use if you want to make things happen in the browser. And it came with every major web browser since the late 90s. THAT is why it gained immense marketshare. Python has been included in Linux, *BSD, and macOS for years. It's a very simple language to make things happen with little effort; it is "accessible" to most people, particularly non computer scientists. It reads a little bit more like English than other languages, and it doesn't require compiling (again to accessibility). All these things don't mean it's good. But it got picked up by non-developers and used to solve real world problems and a lot of research problems. More and more specialized modules were written for it, making it even easier to solve many problems. So its accessibility and ecosystem have been good. But that doesn't mean it's good for building big, long lived, easily maintainable or extensible systems. It certainly doesn't mean it's good for building performant systems. See elsewhere in this thread for my link to my biggest complaints (from an old discussion). I'm not a recognized expert on language design, but I've written significant quantities of production code in several languages, including Python, over many years. No doubt people may disagree with my assertion, but using popularity as evidence of disagreement is not valid since popularity often does not correlate to the quality or suitability of something. History is full of companies, technologies, and practices where the most popular was absolutely not the best.