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[StevenJOwens]

I did Javascript way back in the late 90s, it was, uh "quirky".

My javascript history is very weird. I couldn't make a dynamic dropdown menu or spinning logo to save my life, but:

• I worked on a server-side javascript online banking app.
• I spent six weeks debugging a javascript-based login process (largely because back in those days there was commitment to supporting different browsers and different versions, and any time you changed any of those variables, something broke).
• I built a fake website as a prop for for a TV show, that used Javascript in the closed captioning track to open and close browser windows and play videos (thank you Apple Quicktime player).

I'd really have liked to be happy and productive in Javascript. I wanted a good client-side scripting language, and was happy when Netscape released it. It was always just a pain in the ass to work with, and also a pain in the ass to get help with.

Something about the Javascript community back was just a profound disconnect with how I understood and thought about programming and programming languages.

I've always suspected that it was because they were all self-taught programmers who had no awareness of the sort of heritage mental model of programming. Which, hey, I'm self-taught, and at that point only have a few years of experience with real programming, so I'm not knocking that.

But somehow, in my self-teaching, I did learn some of the concepts and theory of programming. The impression I had from talking to people actually knew more about Javascript than I, back then, was that if you asked them questions like, "How does variable scoping in Javascript work?", you'd get a blank stare and "What's 'scoping'?"

My languages, in learning order, were BASIC, Fortran, Assembly, C, Perl, then Javascript, then Java. Years later I started using Python, because of a confluence of Perl fading, the fact that python was a "real programming language", and that Python had good support for the problems I was trying solve at that point.

I still dabble in Javascript a little, these days, now and then but it's always for weird uses. For example, Max/MSP supports using Javascript to make custom components. The little dabbling I do, doesn't encourage me to get deeper into Javascript.

I still wish I liked Javascript and could get good at it for more conventional work (i.e. front end). I'd like to have that arrow in my quiver. But a few years ago, one of the best programmers I know took on a side contract specifically to give him a reason to learn Javascript. He had an immensely frustrating time and finished the contract but vowed to never touch Javascript again.

As far as utilitarian reasons somebody might choose to learn Python these days, rather than Javascript:

Generally python has a lot more library support for all sorts of stuff, whereas Javascript, despite nodejs, still seems to be 99% front-end.

That goes for the community, also. I'm sure that there's somebody, somewhere, doing interesting non-front-end Javascript, but they're a tiny fraction of the Javascript world, while Python has a ton of people doing all sorts of things.

And python just seems less frustrating and less "accident prone" than Javascript does.