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Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by nepeckman on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @09:55AM (#19738330)
This language choice was made 10 years ago by developers working for NASA. While I think it was a questionable choice, I don't think it was a hype driven choice and I don't think its accurate to say these developers only know JavaScript.
Re:James Webb Telescope will run a proprietary JS interprete... by mturmon on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @11:10AM (#19739149)
Come to think of it, STScI, which is where those developers worked (and maybe still do), was always a favorable environment for Python.

Back in the early 2000s, before Numpy was a thing, STScI developed an image-file-reader for Python called PyFITS, and an underlying array extension to Python that allowed multiple base types, slicing, etc., called numarray (e.g., see https://scipy.github.io/old-wiki/pages/History_of_SciPy.html). In some sense, STScI might have been expected to prefer Python to JS.