* Ubiquitous.
* Not owned by a single corporation.
* Fairly performant runtime characteristics, with multiple implementations.
* Optional typing for quick explorations.
* Quite pleasant to use in its 2020 incarnation.
* The community has a proven process, tooling and track record of incrementally improving a language and its ecosystem.
Please don't shoot, I'm interested in constructive criticism.
And if Python, Julia and R don't cut it, then there's no reason to think another scripting language would. Instead you'd be looking at a statically typed and compile language with excellent support for parallelism.
Going from Python to JavaScript is a step backwards, not forward.
On Differentiable Programming, you might be aware of a tensorflow counterpart in javascript:
I tested this to a certain extent and its not a toy. Its well thought out product from a very talented team, and has the ease of coding that we love about javascript. It can run on browsers!
This being said, we should note the strengths of a statically compiled language with the ease of installation and deployment like with Go, Rust, Nim, etc. in enterprise scale numerical computing.