It's more of a case-in-point than a straw man. Javascript is a great example of how unpredictable language popularity can be. The implicit argument, "Languages deserve the userbase they attract," is what's under attack.

One could use Javascript to argue that while midlevel languages tend to live in a sort of meritocracy that the very top level of languages always have some sort of immensely-powerful backer that they ride on. JS rode on top of Netscape at time when they were just that powerful. Java rode on Sun. C# and Objective C are there because of their powerful backers Microsoft and Apple.

An interesting idea. I wonderf if this means Go is destined for "greatness".

I think if they wanted to make it happen, they could. They don't seem to care to at the moment, but it's not hard to create plausible scenarios over the next few years where that changes.

I'm pretty sure the canonical example should be PHP. Javascript had a lot of things interesting about it and consistent function names. It's actually not a bad language.

It's a pretty bad language. There may be worse, but it's pretty bad.