> Two hours of my life gone...
Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?
And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too
This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill
Any C/C++ project with even mild complexity has a good chance of being extremely difficult to build due to either missing libraries that have to be installed manually, system incompatibilities, or compiler issues.
Python has like 28 competing package managers and install options, half of which are deprecated or incompatible. I can't even run `pip install` at all anymore on Debian.
Even Rust, which is usually great and has modern packaging and built-in dependency management, often has issues building old projects due to breaking changes to the compiler.
All this is to try to say that I don't think this is some problem unique to JS at all - but rather a side effect of complex interconnected systems that change often.
A big reason Docker and containers in general became so popular was because it makes this problem a lot less difficult by bundling much of the environment into the container, and Docker is very much agnostic to the language and ecosystem running inside it.
That's not the only reason. :)
Horrible syntax full of inconsistencies, bolted on type system with TypeScript helps but will always be bolted on, quirks everywhere, as if `null` was not bad enough they also have `undefined`, I can go on.
I simply avoid it for anything but small enhancements scripts on otherwise static HTML pages.
Likewise.
> I know [...] C, C++, C#, Python, Go, various flavors of Assembly
That's good. But these are all languages that either lack strong typing and or are themselves rather quirky.
Only C# and Go stand out, IMHO, as languages that are recently designed. Even Python did not have user defined classes in the first versions, and some things thus feel off (__len__, __init__, etc.).
Also C# and Go still have implicit nulls all over the place. Their designs show ignorance for modern language design. Sum-types, explicit null, immutability, sound type systems -- all lacking in all langs you mention.
So what languages do have these IMHO "Game changers"? OCaml/ReScript/ReasonML, Haskell, Elm, Rust, Gleam, F#, Scala, Kotlin, ...
Those languages really showed _me_ something important: how it could be better.
There is another group of languages that also sits on a unique place in the solution space: the LISPs (incl. Racket, Schemes and Clojure). I found it very worth while to learn to program with them as well.
And there's a reason practically nobody uses the languages you mentioned, and Javascript is so wildly popular. Most people don't really like or need type nagging systems. Sure, if you're trying to launch a rocket or doing something like building medical equipment or something else that requires covering your ass, then yeah, sure, go ahead and type the hell out of it. But for most programming tasks the languages you mentioned are overkill and frankly too obscure to use.
Also: TS popularity shows that not everyone in the JS community agree with you.
For server side web dev you will find that statically typed langs (Java, Kotlin, C#, Go) are a big chunk of the pie. Sure it also comes down to taste, but if you work in a large team, having stronger types can greatly help to keep the codebase in shape. (better IDE refactor tools, clearer for noob, harder to hide/ check in rubbish to git)
If you are afraid by obscurity, have a look at Kotlin!
TS is to the rescue when you have a big JS project, because that's what JS is not good at: big projects and large teams.