There is a brilliant language that looks like Javascript that is the language you might be thinking of when you say "Javascript is pretty good". Unfortunately, that language only exists in people's heads.
In practice, Javascript is full of crazy weird edge cases where it is required to behave in an insane manner because the browser vendors have all been juggling the idiot ball amongst themselves when implementing it.
I like Javascript. I don't see any problem with the language itself. I see problems with the browser ecosystem as a whole, but that's another story.
I understand the argument "popular != good", but I think that if in the long term a tool raises in popularity this is not random.
There should be reasons for that.
There is a brilliant language that looks like Javascript that is the language you might be thinking of when you say "Javascript is pretty good". Unfortunately, that language only exists in people's heads.
In practice, Javascript is full of crazy weird edge cases where it is required to behave in an insane manner because the browser vendors have all been juggling the idiot ball amongst themselves when implementing it.
e.g. https://medium.com/@daffl/javascript-the-weird-parts-8ff3da5...