Or are you just being snobbish about javascript? It's a pretty solid language, and has interpreters installed on virtually every computer on earth with built-in distribution.
>It has built-in interpreters (read "Browsers") on every computer.
JS is pretty slow (It uses an interpreter!). The notion of using it on the backend is debatable. "A lot of people are putting a lot of effort in to it" isn't a valid argument. u said it yourself: "people are told to/forced to use it"
As for the hardware thing, didn't you read the HN discussion about that? no body thinks that's a good idea. It just a way to let web devs do something on the hardware without bothering to learn an actual low level language.
It is pretty fast. It has a world class VM with an optimising JIT compiler. V8 is considerably faster than many other interpreted language, Ruby, Python etc. It's being used on the backend by many smart companies.
>> As for the hardware thing [...] It just a way to let web devs do something on the hardware without bothering to learn an actual low level language.
I know C. I use it when necessary but I'd rather write JS. Apparently so would plenty of other people. It's not about laziness.
"has interpreters installed on virtually every computer on earth with built-in distribution" - which means we are stuck with it, thanks very much for "open" web.
"Thought leaders" are hopefully just using the best language suited for the job. It often comes down to what kind of code you are writing and what it needs to run on.