> JS is actually a crazy powerful functional programming language in disguise.

I feel the same way. And since you can write a cruddy jQuery mess that fetches data and spits out to backend-as-a-service providers, Javascript is hands down the easiest way to go from nothing -> project others can use.

The ecosystem is in a bunch of growing pains right now, but if you don't care about maintainability and scaling up to a large project, just throw up an HTML page with some styling and javascript that makes it interactive.