That is actually a great comparison and a very strong argument for not using JavaScript. BASIC was big in the 1980s; where is BASIC today? Elisp code from the 1980s still runs or can be trivially ported to Emacs 25. Lisp is not a fad and Lisp never goes away.
Well, to be fair, I don't think JavaScript is at risk of dying the way BASIC did, for a lot of reasons that aren't really worth going into. If it is going to die, though, then WebAssembly is the writing on the wall.
Still, I think you're looking at this from a different angle than I am. I haven't seen one person suggest that it would be a good idea to take the Lisp out of Emacs; simply that having the option to script it with other languages would be nice.
I don't see much VB around these days, it was stigmatized so much that just about every shop had to convert to c# (or something else) or they went under because due to the dead sea effect. 10 years ago half of all .net jobs would be VB.net, these days it's probably under 1/10th.
But that's kind of beside the point, VB.net is nothing like the BASIC of the 80's or the 90's, it's got more in common with java.
VB.NET is used a lot in life sciences for data analysis by people that know some programming, given that many places have Windows only desktop policy and the data readers happen to only have DLL or COM APIs as programming interface.
The medicine you might take, has been probably measured DRC reaction curves in some VB.NET application.
It is the surviving BASIC, the evolution of QuickBasic and Visual Basic into the .NET environment.
Regarding the 80's BASIC, GW-BASIC was probably the last one of such type of unstructured line numbered BASIC.
The last time I touched BASIC was Visual Basic 6. VB.NET is a great example of my point - from what I understand it was a huge pain to move VB6 applications to VB.NET
I hardly cared about VB since the Visual Basic 6 days, but then I got a few contracts in life sciences domain, and got to realize they are heavy users of it.
That is the tool that many researchers with some programming skills reach for, maybe they will some day move to Python or R, but VB is what they use currently.
