[bartq]

JS is the best language for web - and generally for high level systems design - and honestly I don't know why people don't want to see it. Good parts of JS are: first class functions and closures and prototypical inheritance. Find decently popular language with those things implemented well, good luck. Rest of JS features are a noise, improvements of developer work ergonomics (all those let/const, modules, async/await and what not etc) and unfortunately pile of bad decisions which cannot be undone because web has to work correctly and do not break constantly.

JavaScript really is a Scheme in disguise with a little bit of Smalltalk. Which really is good. If you don't like junk coming from {}+[] - don't use it, but I consider the lack of errors thrown to be a correct behaviour. Use TS or any other linter to control stuff.

As we can see, Clojure wasn't accepted widely despite the fact it also has first class functions and closures. In my opinion the answer is simple: people want to have syntax for stuff which we agreed is good. Using macros and ((())) is not what people want to do long term.

[blep_]

Because lots of languages have first-class functions, and prototypical inheritance isn't actually that good an idea and most people just use it to implement bad class systems.

[panzi]

These days nobody even knows that its prototypical inheritance. There is a class syntax now and everyone uses that. `class Foo extends Bar { ... }`