>> JS only picked up steam because Flash died. Not because it was a great language. If it were a great language people would have started optimizing it 5 years

>> JS only picked up steam because Flash died. Not because it was a great language. If it were a great language people would have started optimizing it 5 years ago. It isn't. So they didn't. The new optimizations are out of necessity. And because it lets front end pretend to be backend. That may sound snobby, and it is, but JS for backend is like writing in Visual Basic. These days you can do anything in it, it will be fast, but that doesn't make it the right choice. Very much ^this. I never cease to be amazed by the defensive attitude and excuses coming from JavaScript developers. Usually the premise is "I can get shit done in it, so it must be good", which isn't a particularly strong argument. If you would make up 20 completely different metrics to rank programming languages on, and score every popular language using each of them, JavaScript would be near the bottom of almost all of them, and near the top of none. It's not terrible in every way imaginable (it would score reasonably well on 'productivity' for example), but it's not great in any of them either, which frankly makes it a shit language that only exists as a historical accident.