"Why would anyone want to use Javascript anyway?"
I don't know... maybe because the async actually *works* the first time, everytime? And you don't need to play Quartets to try and find async libraries that work with each other?
Because there's an off-the-shelf library for almost every problem you might have, without being forced to buy into a monstrous-to-upgrade "framework"?
Because aside from globals (which ~nobody uses anymore), there's a near-guarantee that you can trace back any identifier or reference to its point of definition, without needing special analysis tools?
Because it has actual isolated modules, rather than some conflict-prone "namespace" nonsense that causes dependency version conflicts down the line?
Because it doesn't impose an arbitrary requirement of "one version per dependency across the entire codebase, including transitive dependencies", and so eliminates the usual dependency hell?
Because you don't need to be constrained to highly restrictive class syntax, just to get some good performance out of your code?
Because there are extensive and near-perfect compatibility layers to make the absolute most recent language features, even *experimental* ones, work in positively ancient environments?
Yes, I wonder why anyone would ever want to use Javascript.
re: "Why would anyone want to use Javascript anyway?"
@MTRNord Oh, certainly, and I would say that my biggest criticism of JS is that 99% of the learning resources for it don't actually teach people how to use it well, and that does have very real effects on the code that people write in practice.
It's just especially frustrating how people constantly try to extrapolate this into "haha what a crappy language, you must be incompetent to use it" (not always said so explicitly, but usually intended that way) while using something themselves that doesn't even get half of these points right.
re: "Why would anyone want to use Javascript anyway?"
@joepie91 yep. Fully agreeing. The language is fine for what it tries to be. The docs are hit-and-miss. But the linters and typescript are imho as high quality as other languages with similar tools. I would go as far as saying eslint is one of my top 3 static linters I know of. Especially as projects actively extend it when they implement things that benefit from lints.
re: "Why would anyone want to use Javascript anyway?"
@joepie91 Also on that note I can probably throw, if I wanted to, many of the same criticism js gets also at python. They have similar things in that ecosystem too. :) (as do most languages if you actually look into it as a newcomer. *cough* C++ *cough*)
"Why would anyone want to use Javascript anyway?"
@joepie91 js is both great and bad at the same time. Its a really nice language to start with with a wide ecosystem. Perfect for quick coding. The language is fairly easy to grasp too.
On the flipside it also has quite a lot of weird edge cases. But then you also dont run into most of them if you just use modern best practices. And things like typescript or eslint will warn you about the edge cases.
TLDR: its great if used correctly.