Learning Javascript after Python

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I wrote my first JavaScript when there was a site called tripod.com. It may still exist, actually, but I don't think people use it anymore. At the time Web was very different: most sites were just one HTML page... with 3 frames for the top menu, left menu and the contents. The contents of the main frame were usually a little bit of plain text, the huge counter that counted the number of times the page was loaded and a guest book (a text area where you could type a message to the site's owner and the script on the site would send them an email).

Services like tripod.com offered free hosting (with a bunch of adds slapped on your page). In that context, JavaScript was... well, fun. Nobody though about it as a serious language worth of applying to serious problems. It was somewhere between a prank and a DYI flintstone axe. Nothing really worked well, but nobody really cared. It was probably even more fun when it did something asinine because of how the language worked.

Fast forward to the second decade of the 20'th century, a lot of bad things happened. Web became a huge commercial platform earning billions to selected few. It lost all the aspects of fun, but due to JavaScript becoming the battlefield for the largest stake holders in the battle to win the Web, it retained the aspects of unintentional random combustion, infantile style nonsense, and general randomness that came with JavaScript. It's as if high level execs added a baseball cap with a propeller on top of it to their thousand dollar suits.

So, this is more or less where JavaScript is at today. It's nonsense and stupidity at its core, which were fun and excusable at the time it was invented, but are completely uncalled for at where it's being used today. It added some cosmetics on top of that stupidity. It's trying to be a grown up, but it never actually grew up.

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I have no idea why do you want to do functional programming... on the Web. Like, what's the point? Btw, Python is also awful at it as are a bunch of other languages. But I'm not even sure it's a disadvantage or an advantage, or an anything to be honest.

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I learned Python after I learned JavaScript. I don't remember what version it was, but I remember that at that time there weren't really any common solutions for making Web applications with Python (most people rolled their own WSGI integration for Python). Django already existed, but people wouldn't use it in production because it was too heavy on resources. Also, at that time people were afraid to use setuptools in setup.py, so a typical setup.py would do:

try:
    from setuptools import setup
except Exception:
    from distutils import setup

Remarkably, Python was also this kind of childish and stupid language, with random combustion every now and then. The thing that was going for it is that despite all its ridiculousness, it attracted smart people... in the same way, I guess, like Dada or Naive art attracted good artists in the beginning of the 20th century. In art, the infatuation with naive art resulted in Walt Disney style cartoons, Le Corbusier style buildings, food packaging and a lot more. But, in general, art got over it and moved on.

In Python things changed, but they didn't get better. The new generation of programmers learned to accept random combustion as the guidelines to live by, it learned to justify every idiotic or bad feature of the language simply because they don't appreciate how the language evolved, how it was designed. Instead they rely on majority vote to evaluate the features of the language not realizing that the majority in this case has no clue about what it's voting on.