I'd kind of assume everyone on HN has made their minds up about languages and I'm not qualified to change the opinions of any of them or even really try to be informative. So the puke is just for the (70% at a guess?) people who would agree that this is a bad choice.

Since I work with both python and javascript in exactly this dirty moving data around for analysts space (but haven't for long), I'll qualify a bit.

The most important point is that python absolutely brutally dominates the data science space, there are no javascript equivalents to the python ecosystem, it's not even close.

Secondary point is that javascript is much lower level than python in a language sense. Python already has classes built in, reflection, sane typing, just tons of batteries.

Javascript as someone smarter than me said before is lisp with C syntax. It's definitely possible to build a good language out of Javascript by using the right libraries and making decisions on how you're going to implement inheritance etc but it's just tons harder than python or almost any other language which has defaults on these decisions made for you. Guys automating their data flows aren't going to be at the level to make these decisions well but they will run into the same problems they solve and implement their own insane schemes.

I'd much much rather debug amateur VBA or Python than amateur javascript.