[dwrodri]

I know the whole "there are two types of programming languages" Stroustrup quote applies to JS just as much as it does to C++, but can anyone comment on whether JS was hated as much as it was back when this second generation of browsers was being built? As someone who went straight into research and low-level work, I don't touch JS very often, but it seems to me as though the Web is in this arranged marriage it doesn't like, but refuses to leave because of the inconvenience.

I feel like in some regards, we have seen generational shifts in other languages. In domains where Perl, Java, and C++ used to dominate, we now have Go, Rust, and Python.

Absolutely worth noting that with the exception of Python, there are probably still vastly more lines of C++/Java code running in production than Go/Rust. I kind of don't get how if JavaScript is so bad, then why do we now have things like Node?

[Latty]

If I had to guess, I'd say Node is popular because the web has eaten the world, and if you already have a web app as the core of your development, it starts to make sense to make everything else just an extension of that, including your server so you can do things like server-side rendering.

A lot of that development seems to be TypeScript too, which helps mitigate a lot of the problems of raw JavaScript, and the structural typing makes working with JSON (something now pretty universal too) far easier than with a lot of languages.

There are a lot of things I hate about JavaScript itself, but TypeScript's type system is genuinely great.