Haha, nice link. Yeah, pretty much this.

I'd expand on it to answer the original question more fully from my perspective: I don't actually hate node.js per se. I'm sure it's a very good javascript environment.

For me, the problem is a fundamental one: you're choosing to write javascript somewhere where you don't have to be writing javascript. I disagree on principle with doing that: friends don't let friends choose js. For me, any technical merits of the implementation and the benefits of running the same code on both server and client sides aren't important - IMO you're better off to just use a good language instead, only using as much js as is absolutely necessary.

I literally don't think I've ever seen anybody try to argue that js is a good language. I can't conceive of anybody trying to argue that such a pitiful standard library is a good idea. Why in god's name would you choose to use it server side when you could be writing something less excruciating like perl or php or assembler or brainfuck?

> Why the big guys picked javascript, I don't know.

To be fair, they never really picked it per se, it was just the only thing that was kinda-sorta standardised enough that you could write code and kinda-sorta-almost get it to run on most browsers without installing some horrible plug-in. I think a more appropriate question is why it never got replaced with something not-awful.

The larger book covers things like scripting CSS and SVGs and goes in to exhaustive detail about the language. If you subtract the smaller from the larger the resulting set is not “bad parts of JavaScript “

One person’s opinion of Python’s good parts would be equally small and any opinion would be very small compared it to the entire official documentation.