Javascript doesn't have a good "starting point". Either you learn it in the browser, and then you need to learn HTML first, or you learn it in node.js, and then

Javascript doesn't have a good "starting point". Either you learn it in the browser, and then you need to learn HTML first, or you learn it in node.js, and then it's hard to get Python levels of "fun". In Python, input() is one of the first things you learn, and that actually lets you make somewhat interesting programs. Once you learn loops and conditionals, you know enough to write a "guess the number" game, which is probably the simplest actually useful program you can make. Once you learn to deal with files, you already get superpowers, you don't even need functions, classes and such for simple, text-munging scripts. Node makes this a lot harder, the simplest way to have interactivity is the readline library, and that requires you to understand functions, closures and the idea of a callback and why one is needed. Then there's the "R way" of learning Python, in a Jupyter notebook, by stringing functions from Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib and perhaps some other libraries in your field together, with no understanding of what a loop is, because you don't really need those for basic dataframe and tensor work.