It's definitely more versatile, but I think that's actually one of its disadvantages. It's a prototypal language, so you miss out on learning proper object-oriented programming practices. You can do functional programming, but unless you use TypeScript, the notion of strong typing and type safety isn't there. You _can_ use Node to write client-side JavaScript programs, but you're basically tying your boat onto Chromium/Chrome (because it uses V8).
This isn't to say that JavaScript isn't capable. It's plenty capable, and when combined with TypeScript, it's pretty powerful. I just think that it's not a great idea as a primary first-principles language.
Javascript has an excess of versatility, if anything. Python is the perfect prototyping language, I've found over time. And I took a really long while to board that train, coming from Perl.
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I would categorize Javascript as being more versatile than Python because of browser programming.
It's definitely more versatile, but I think that's actually one of its disadvantages. It's a prototypal language, so you miss out on learning proper object-oriented programming practices. You can do functional programming, but unless you use TypeScript, the notion of strong typing and type safety isn't there. You _can_ use Node to write client-side JavaScript programs, but you're basically tying your boat onto Chromium/Chrome (because it uses V8).
This isn't to say that JavaScript isn't capable. It's plenty capable, and when combined with TypeScript, it's pretty powerful. I just think that it's not a great idea as a primary first-principles language.
Javascript has an excess of versatility, if anything. Python is the perfect prototyping language, I've found over time. And I took a really long while to board that train, coming from Perl.