Modern JS isn't that bad. Some of the tooling and frameworks are though.

I'm not sure it's Javascript's fault. The ecosystem that is using it would have found a language to live somewhere.

The idiom of ephemeral, throw away, spaghetti of dependencies was born out of the way the web platform moved forward, the short lived nature of websites and web apps, and the spread of developers with different backgrounds that were working on it all.

If we were using Javascript to develop native windows apps then I am sure the ecosystem would be very different. However, that would be dumb, right? cough

It doesn't have to. I've said this in a few other threads lately: I'm using intercooler.js which is basically HTML++ for a lot of my work now, and I barely ever write javascript unless I need a front-end plugin of some sort.

You get 90% of the functionality at 10% of the complexity, and your back end looks essentially the same as it always has, in whatever language you want.

The same can be said to all programming languages...

The language is only slightly crap, its the things people use Javascript for that are blood curdling.

That ship has sailed.

As much as I would like to have something different for the browser (such as Scheme, as originally envisioned, or Lua, which would have been a better fit), the world has moved on.

Only hope is to compile to javascript or webassembly (or "transpile", as js folks like to call it).

Read Javascript the Good Parts by Crockford and you will feel slightly better about the language.

JavaScript isn't the problem. The cargo-culting by mediocre developers is the problem.