I honestly don’t quite get why it’s so common to hate Javascript.

I mean, it’s not my favorite language to put it mildly (I prefer type systems that beat me into submission) but as far as popular dynamically typed languages go, it’s not nearly the worst offender out there. Yes, lol, weird things equal weird things when you use == but that’s not exactly unique among dynamic languages, and some people couldn’t come to terms with it not being like Java despite the name so they never bothered learning how prototypal inheritance works, and also who the fuck needed both null and undefined when either of those by itself is already a mistake and introducing them to a language should be grounds for a nice, solid kick to the groin.

But, warts and all, the implementations are generally reasonably performant as far as these things go, the syntax is recognizable because eg. braces are common whether we like them or not and notably also survives copy-pasting from eg. the internet or anything that doesn’t use the same whitespace you do, and it’ll happily let you write code in a quite multiparadigm way, leading to some people to insist Javascript is kind of like Scheme and other people to insist Javascript is nothing like Scheme.

So, shit could be worse. And by “shit” and “worse” I mean eg. Python, notable for achievements such as: being one of the first if not the first language with a designer who huffed enough solvents to think that semantically significant whitespace is a great idea especially combined with no real standardization on whether you need to use tabs or spaces, and which often doesn’t survive being copy-pasted from the web and is a nightmare to format; being unable to actually run anything in parallel up until very recently because lol why bother with granular locking in the runtime when you can just have one global interpreter lock and be done with it; or being popular in part due to the fact that its FFI makes it easy to write modules for it in languages that aren’t a crime against common sense and can run faster and more parallel than an 80’s BASIC interpreter. And let’s not even go into the whole “virtual environment” thing.

So while Python’s not quite INTERCAL-bad, at least INTERCAL doesn’t have significant whitespace and its manuals are really damn funny.

And then there’s eg. Ruby, with 9999 ways to do everything and all of them so slow that it aspires to one day be as fast as INTERCAL, and PHP which is a practical joke that went too far and somehow managed to eventually convince people it’s actually a real language.

edit: oh and if you don’t know about INTERCAL, I can highly recommend checking out the the C-INTERCAL revision’s manual, which includes eg. a very helpful circuitous diagram and a logical table to explain one of its more odd operators. There’s also a resource page that’s maintained by one of the perpetrators of the C-INTERCAL revision.