The hype around javascript is representative of a more general and widespread problem, which is…

The hype around javascript is representative of a more general and widespread problem, which is that inexperienced programmers make poor design decisions based on familiarity and ease of initial development. Javascript is popular for exactly the same reason that PHP, perl, and java are popular: it’s an extremely common first language, an extremely common second language, and there are certain kinds of tasks for which it is not poorly suited as a prototyping language. People use javascript for the same reason that they use HTTP: it’s the first thing they think of, and they don’t bother to analyse whether or not it’s an appropriate tool.