I'm with you that most of the criticism of JS is directed at 2011 JS rather than 2021 JS.
A few things that aren't great for my use cases:
- The language has its fair share of footguns. It's a much better language than most people give it credit for, and most of them are easily avoided by a good linter, but still doesn't feel as clean as something like Python.
- The ecosystem is great but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. node_modules with gigabytes of dependencies isn't even funny. I'd still classify the ecosystem as a big win for JS, but there are things that could be handled better.
- The standard library is awful and some parts are downright broken (e.g. dates). If I'm using C++, Java or Python I have at my fingertips very powerful data structures an import away. Many of those things are also available for JS, but they come as separate dependencies.
- Having the same language full-stack is nice, but client-side JS and server-side JS are different enough that there's going to be a context switch regardless. That point is true but somewhat oversold.
(You didn't say this and I'm not going to claim you did, but don't even get me started on how full stack JS evangelists try to sell you mongoDB-like datastores. There is a 99% chance the correct place to put your data is a SQL database.)
- It doesn't play nice with C.
- Doesn't lend itself to quick stuff outside the browser/web server paradigm. Things like OS scripting or small ad-hoc programs.
I have no doubts that Deno or Node can run those fine, but their evented interfaces make everything harder than it needs to be, especially since those tasks often require reading and writing to stdin/stdout/files.
It's not a problem for larger projects, but very clunky in a script.
A few things that aren't great for my use cases:
- The language has its fair share of footguns. It's a much better language than most people give it credit for, and most of them are easily avoided by a good linter, but still doesn't feel as clean as something like Python.
- The ecosystem is great but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. node_modules with gigabytes of dependencies isn't even funny. I'd still classify the ecosystem as a big win for JS, but there are things that could be handled better.
- The standard library is awful and some parts are downright broken (e.g. dates). If I'm using C++, Java or Python I have at my fingertips very powerful data structures an import away. Many of those things are also available for JS, but they come as separate dependencies.
- Having the same language full-stack is nice, but client-side JS and server-side JS are different enough that there's going to be a context switch regardless. That point is true but somewhat oversold.
(You didn't say this and I'm not going to claim you did, but don't even get me started on how full stack JS evangelists try to sell you mongoDB-like datastores. There is a 99% chance the correct place to put your data is a SQL database.)
- It doesn't play nice with C.
- Doesn't lend itself to quick stuff outside the browser/web server paradigm. Things like OS scripting or small ad-hoc programs.