[grzm]

Given the rise of transpilers targeting JavaScript, "stuck with javascript" doesn't mean quite as much as it may have in the past. You could argue that this is "bolted on", but given the current state of tooling and how quickly it's improving, I don't think it's a fair characterization. I suspect this trend will only continue.

[moxious]

Here here! This transpilation thing is something relatively unique about the JS world, namely that it mutates really fast with capabilities like transpilation. Yes, it's done in other languages in limited situations but JS is the only one I can think of where transpilation is normal and standard, i.e. writing in es6 and then babelizing it to es5 for legacy nodes.

Then you add things like flow, or TypeScript, and frankly I'm losing track of exactly what it means to write in JS anyway.