[nickpp]

But the fact that developers often need to be able to cover any one (or even multiple) of these areas, and that language proficiency (with platform APIs and various quirks) is quite hard to achieve - makes me think that the actual alternative is the elephant in the room, the one not even listed here: JavaScript.

[deepsun]

Having been programming continuously on JavaScript for over 20 with all the popular frameworks, I'd try to stay away from it as much as possible:

1. Dynamic typing must die. Except for R/Julia/Python (aka JuPyteR) notebooks use-case, where it's awesome. My list includes only statically-typed languages. Typescript is much better, but its type-checking still fails sometimes, unlike real static-typed languages.

2. NPM is a mess that allows any transitive dependency to run arbitrary code on your machine at a time of installation (including cleaning up after itself). Compare that to Java's Maven -- libs quality is much better. no arbitrary code runs, just downloading.

[throwitaway1123]

> allows any transitive dependency to run arbitrary code on your machine at a time of installation

This point gets parroted so often on HN [1]. You can install packages with the --ignore-scripts flag to disable this behavior, or just set the option globally in your NPM config file. I do like the way Bun disables lifecycle scripts by default [2], but it takes me all of two seconds to run `npm config set ignore-scripts=true` on a new machine, so it's basically a non-issue for me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38797176

[2] https://bun.sh/docs/cli/install#lifecycle-scripts

[palata]

Are you seriously mentioning JS as a C++ alternative? I am confused.

[nickpp]

I am old enough to remember when everything was written in C++, except embedded and OS kernels in C. Today even my chat, email client and IDE are written in JavaScript...

[palata]

> Today even my chat, email client and IDE are written in JavaScript...

Yeah I don't consider that a good thing :-)