Because it’s the new Franca lingua of programming. Everyone knows it whether they like it or not. There’s value in not have to switch context while programming. Also there’s typescript which makes JavaScript usable. I don’t like JavaScript either but typescript isn’t terrible and the ecosystem is much bigger than any Microsoft programming ecosystem which results in less reinventions of the wheel. MS has also been treating JavaScript as a 1st class citizen on Windows
> MS has also been treating JavaScript as a 1st class citizen on Windows
Eh what now?
The ActiveSctipt host for JScript (for shell and Classic ASP scripting) hasn’t been updated since Windows 2000, and for shell scripting in-general Microsoft has been (“was” at this point?) pushing PowerShell since its demo at PDC 2003.
WinJS for Windows 8 was a huge waste of money for the company that people always seem to forget.
And their Chakra JS engine is effectively now retired given Chromium+V8 replaced EdgeHTML earlier this year.
The only places Microsoft has been using JS are for their current set of Electron-based applications (VS Code, Skype, MS Teams, Azure Storage Explorer, etc). TypeScript is nice and all (and I really love it and I hope it brings algebraic typing and structural typing to more languages) but it’s only popular because Google, of all people, adopted it for Angular.
I suspect that we are reaching peak javascript, that wasm will open the browser to all languages and that javascript will compete based on its own merits rather than its historical monopoly.
