I can't really agree with you. Yes, javascript is "good for what it is", but this kind of positive evaluation is only the result of that it (the language) pretty much can't be avoided when doing web development. Many things appear in a more positive light if they have been around you long enough, and you've gotten use to the experience.
I.e yes, bash is nice, but if it weren't the default shell in most systems I wouldn't ever think about switching to it voluntarily, nor be interested in learning it. It is useful because its so widely spread.
The reasons why people accuse JavaScript of being a terrible hack just never really resonated with me.
The "wat" video is funny, but that stuff just isn't a problem in my experience. Sure, I've been confused by "array.map(parseInt)" and other oddities, but overall, I think weird semantic edge cases are mostly an easy thing to nitpick about.
So as I see it, JavaScript is a nice little language with good syntax for literals (JSON, which conquered the world), a familiar brace notation, first class functions, high quality implementations, etc.
Bash's oddities are weirder, but it's also a fun and extremely useful language, and I like it a lot. Many of my coding and administration tasks involve calling programs, running background processes, piping streams around, making temporary files, globbing, etc etc, and shell scripting is still unsurpassed in convenience for these things.
I don't think js it's a hack. Yes, in the beginning there were some strange things, like objects based on prototype, referring to this, and probably more. Much of this has been worked on, and fixed (unfortunately-but-understandably keeping the old behaviors as well).
But nowdays there are many who want more-- they want types --and not only simple types, but some advanced type system. This is where it's hard to see the intersection of js "likers" and type theory "likers" -- they must have really different reasons for liking these things.
As for where the criticism towards js probably stems from is the lack of freedom -- it's the only language that runs in browser. On the server people are free to choose what to use. And yes, you can now compile other languages to js too, but reaching an agreement to use such a setup can be challenging in many workplaces.
The overlap between people who love Haskell and people who love Nix is huge, yet Nix has no static typing!
Sure, people recognize that a good static type system could improve Nix, but they also recognize that making such a thing isn't easy and that advanced type systems steepen language learning curves.
I just try to counter the meme that people have to take a side and can't simultaneously appreciate very different languages. :)
I think it's more about where are we coming from and where are we going. I have no nix experience (but know bits from reading stuff on the internet :-), but maybe the pro-nix attitude among haskellers is from a few factors: (1) referentially transparent definitions, and (2) it's better than things that have come before. I.e even with other devops/deployment scripting tools nix adds new value, and is in this sense "on it's way somewhere" (perhaps haskellization, but we'll see). So the nix people might move to the typed version when that happens.
But for languages the typed ones are already here, and have been for quite some time. So if one has stuck around with javascript then my question is why (apart from the practicality reasons).
Yeah, agreed. JavaScript doesn't really have any impressive redeeming features. I like it because it's kind of minimally viable and accidentally really useful for dealing with APIs full of duck typed nested records.
It's really hard to be both minimally viable and have a sound and expressive static type system.
Simply typed lambda calculus isn't even Turing complete, and the fate of Haskell's endless extensions indicates an inherent rabbit hole...
Haskell itself has somewhat horrible issues dealing with extensible records, and the solutions are all complex and hard to understand.
Dealing with JSON in Haskell in a quick and easy way is nowadays quite nice, but it took the invention of van Laarhoven lenses and the aeson-lens module...
I greatly prefer JavaScript to Java because I prefer no static type checking over inexpressive static type checking! And expressive type systems are hard to get right, so it's a very classic "worse is better" situation.
I.e yes, bash is nice, but if it weren't the default shell in most systems I wouldn't ever think about switching to it voluntarily, nor be interested in learning it. It is useful because its so widely spread.