Programming language popularity is mostly driven by a positive feedback loop between which languages the projects/libraries/resources are written in, and which language the developers are most experienced and comfortable with. The properties of the languages do matter, since people will sometimes ignore the preexisting resources and use the language they think is best, and second-movers sometimes have an advantage in getting to use the lessons learned from a successful library. Causally speaking, though, language popularity today is mostly the result of language popularity yesterday.
As for the merits of the languages themselves, I would say that Python[2016] was overwhelmingly better than Javascript[2016], but Python[2020] vs Typescript[2020] is roughly a tossup. Typescript annotations and tooling currently seem better than MyPy. Python’s core syntax and core library is much more expressive than Javascript’s, which is nice. My one experience with Javascript FFI was bad enough that I would consider writing part of a Javscript project in C to be a desperation move; whereas writing parts of a Python project in C is a relatively normal thing to do.
Programming language popularity is mostly driven by a positive feedback loop between which languages the projects/libraries/resources are written in, and which language the developers are most experienced and comfortable with. The properties of the languages do matter, since people will sometimes ignore the preexisting resources and use the language they think is best, and second-movers sometimes have an advantage in getting to use the lessons learned from a successful library. Causally speaking, though, language popularity today is mostly the result of language popularity yesterday.
As for the merits of the languages themselves, I would say that Python[2016] was overwhelmingly better than Javascript[2016], but Python[2020] vs Typescript[2020] is roughly a tossup. Typescript annotations and tooling currently seem better than MyPy. Python’s core syntax and core library is much more expressive than Javascript’s, which is nice. My one experience with Javascript FFI was bad enough that I would consider writing part of a Javscript project in C to be a desperation move; whereas writing parts of a Python project in C is a relatively normal thing to do.