I agree with your sentiment, but your facts are kind of wrong.
Javascript has pretty much nothing to do with Java. It's not a copy of Java in any way. The semantics of it are vastly different and much more influenced by Smalltalk, Self, and Lisp. It's an extremely functional language, which is one of the things that has ultimately saved it. Without higher-order functions, you don't have jQuery, Underscore/Lodash, AMD, Backbone, and all the other innovations that made using JS not suck nearly as much.
Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty flawed language. But "something better" is practically here now, in the form of ES6 and TypeScript, and to a lesser extent, Google's "use strong" proposal, which basically deprecates a whole bunch of old cruft. We're about a year away from being unshackled from the worst aspects of JS. You can pick TypeScript or Babel today and have many of the best benefits of future JS.
An interesting fact is that JavaScript really has nothing to do with Java. They paid Sun $5 million to license the word "Java", because it was an extremely popular language at the time.
Javascript is a scripting language for the browsers. Its original purpose was to make dynamic webpages by allowing browsers to modify their content according to some basic scripts.
If I replace "Java" with "javascript" I get:
> Javascript really shines better in the backend long-lived services realm.
You realize how ironic that sounds, right? No matter how many language improvements, transpilers, builders, etc. you throw at it, javascript will always remain, at its core, a dumb scripting language for browsers.
I don’t want to sound harsh, but saying Javascript is a simpler version of Java just tells me you have never used Java seriously.
It’s like saying Korean is a simpler version of Spanish.
Yes, Java and Javascript are both programming languages, but they don’t even share the same paradigm.
You might be confusing the motivation that led to the creation of Javascript with the actual implementation.
Having said that, I have used Java professionally for more than 7 years, then I switched to mainly Javascript, and later to Typescript, and I’m never going back. I agree with your overall point.
JavaScript has come a long way, to where the shame of any self-respecting engineer has been reduced to a bearable minimum!
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