Node's popularity is a pretty dramatic counterexample to that assertion.
Popularity has nothing to do with quality. Node is popular because so many people knew JavaScript anyway. JavaScript is popular because it was the only widely-supported programming language for the browser (other than ActionScript, which is itself an ECMAScript flavor).
Is that true, though? I see very few JavaScript developers with a solid background in computer science or software engineering on the job market, compared to the demand these days, as more and more stuff goes to the browser or native HTML applications. Taking kids out of web design schools is too much of a gamble unless you already have a senior JS dev on the team to keep an eye on them.
But then again it might be different in places like Silicon Valley.
That's exactly my point. A huge amount of labor for developing web apps are people who have not come from CS/engineering backgrounds. They're self-taught, and a lot of them started with web technologies.
So it was really easy for those people to transition into backend development because they already knew JavaScript.
And that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
The statement "Most of us use it because we have to" is pretty clearly refuted by the fact that no one had to use JS on the server-side, yet plenty still pick Node over other alternatives (even ones they know well).
I wasn't saying that people use it because they have to. There are a lot of reasons to use Node on the server side that are still unrelated to the quality of JavaScript as a language.
1) Easy asynchronous execution (something that is also making Go very popular)
2) Easy to get started
3) Lots of existing libraries
4) Everyone, including frontend devs, knows it already
If you're starting a Python project, you're probably going to prefer hiring Python devs. If you're starting a Node project, you can hire anyone who has done full-stack or frontend work, including Ruby and PHP devs.
Again, all of those are really compelling reasons to use Node, but they have nothing to do with the way JavaScript is designed. The seminal JavaScript book ("The Good Parts") even alludes to the fact that it's not a thoroughly good language.
Further evidence that it's not a good language are the huge number of compile-to-JavaScript projects popping up (TypeScript and Go come to mind).
I also went to a JavaScript conference, and not a single company was using Node through their whole stack, even for new projects. They were typically using Ruby, Python, or PHP for the bulk of their backend, and JavaScript was a thin API layer. I know this is also the case at Yahoo and probably some other companies.
I could write a lot about why I (and lots of others in the dev community) find JavaScript to be Blub-y and fragile, but this is long enough already. The dynamic typing and many ways it behaves unexpectedly are among the major problems.
(Disclaimer: I actually think that many facets of Windows are better than anything else, but I know many here do not.)
I find this topic to be intellectually insulting. You know that JavaScript has its (tens of thousands of) fans. Why tell yourself otherwise? Is your hatred of it so overwhelming that you're not even ready to admit to yourself that others disagree with you?
> But JavaScript is a bad language, objectively. There's little debate on that subject.
Which is obviously false, there is lots of debate on the subject. So can we grow up and get past these blanket statements?
Most of us use it because we have to, even though there are much better languages available.