Is it possible to appreciate JavaScript?

Everywhere I go, JavaScript get slammed. In the presentation that @debergalis made at the AWS Summit, he said something along the lines of, JavaScript was the only reasonable language to build apps, which to me reinforced that it’s not really respected among engineers…

So, from a language perspective, [ what are the / are there any ] things we can say that JavaScript does better than the rest?

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JavaScript, Wat? :wink:

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JavaScript is the most used language in the world, and runs in the most places. That’s enough for me to pick it as my language of choice.

I think the fact that it’s so easy to experiment with new syntax using Babel, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, etc, and still remain compatible with other JS libraries and runtimes is also a huge benefit. I also like the set of syntax guidelines people have standardized on with certain ESLint configs, which get rid of nasty old features like eval and var.

At the end of the day, the “beauty” of a language is just not a factor in my decision-making process. Brackets, syntax, conciseness, whatever - there are many languages out there that obliterate JS in these comparisons. The real question for me is, how many tools are there? How big is the community? How easy is it to get help with it? And in these factors JS, and NPM as a source of libraries, just nukes everything else to oblivion.

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