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No. Popularity does not indicate quality. Judging the quality of something by its popularity is a form of cyclical reasoning. Especially when there is an obvious alternative explanation, namely that JS is the only language you can in the browser without transpiling and for a long time the only one period.

While the fact JS can be used to build all these things puts a floor on its quality, that floor is uselessly low.



I'm not using popularity as the metric. "1 million identical websites were built with JavaScript" wouldn't say much beyond the first website.

But that there is a very broad range of successful applications partly relying on JavaScript for their success undercuts the idea that JavaScript is inherently rubbish. Whether it has some subjective "quality" is a conversation best left for art galleries.


"The proof that JS is actually pretty good is that it has been used to build so many things."

[French Narrator] 5 minutes later...

"I'm not using popularity as the metric."


If you say JS is "pretty good" how is that not a statement about its quality?


Fair point. I guess I could rephrase it as "JavaScript provides a lot of value".




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