- lots of people don't like Javascript
- lots of people don't like V8
- the guy who made Node.js (Ryan Dahl) doesn't like it either
- programmers think anything without thread support is a toy
I like Node.js, Javascript, and Ryan Dahl, and have no strong opinions on V8.
It is dominated on the server because Java, C#, Elixir, Erlang have a concurrency and parallelism story and node doesn’t.
For most scripting work it is hard to beat Python even if Python is slow.
Sometimes I think compiler and tools writing for node might be fun (boy the world needs an ISO common logic implementation that isn’t hets and Haskell) but compiler and tools writing in Java is fun too, particularly in JDK 16. (Think ‘Haskell the good parts’.)
Apropos of nothing...
I find Python to be unreadable. I have a moderate reading issue and Python just looks like random letters to me. I actually wish I could process it as there are some very nice tools that I see people make that use Python.
I would love a more in-depth exploration about this part of your message, if you have some time. I didn't explore the compiler/tools ecosystem for Java for some time, would love to know the advances it got that prompted your message.
With sealed types, var, and similar features, pattern matching, it is getting better all the time in small ways.
I recently wrote a dsl in Java that lets you write a Java AST , transform it as a tree, write Java source code, compile it. It is not quite as simple as doing the same in LISP and you have to mangle names a little to unerase types, but the IDE helps you find the names.