[OkayPhysicist]

I don't think JavaScript sucks. But it certainly did suck when in it was first introduced, and it only got better because of the "I have to use it" -> "I'll fix the worst mistakes" -> "still kinda sucks" -> repeat loop that was enforced by its monopoly on the browser space. Any language in its situation would have been refined at least to the level of mediocrity we enjoy in JavaScript today.

If you look at the post I replied to, I was countering the idea that "JavaScript must be good because lots of people use it". JavaScript is popular today because it was popular yesterday, and the roots of that chain is JavaScript was popular in late 90's because it was your only real choice.

I've used actually bad languages professionally. JavaScript today is merely mediocre, thanks to nearly 30 years of fixing. But it's still held back by its roots of being kinda awful. There are unambiguously better choices for non-browser codebases, unless "whatever is popular" is a primary driver.

[porknubbins]

I (ignorantly) thought of Python as JS with more syntactic sugar, but after I switched over I realized that JS has very little intentional design- its a random collection of features and quirks that invites you to shoot yourself in the foot. I mean just let,const, var and declaring a variable with no keyword at all is a huge mess.