When a language becomes stable, it also begins to lose popularity. (This is widely discussed).
Javascript is the only language that has continued to grow forever without becoming an "old" language in dev mindset.
One reason is the constant churn of tooling, another is the immaturity of everything, so every generation of devs have a place to add something.
Overall JS gains more than it loses.
This is similar to the concept that the first buggy language to capture mindshare will eventually fix its bugs and leave the initially more perfect competitors behind.
That’s the thing about JS. It’s popular because it was first and grew into a monopoly. The language itself is horrific. We are permanently stuck with a poorly designed language because it has momentum which can’t be overcome.
But all these improvements should mean productivity improvements. But my engineers still aren’t able after 18 months on a React project to churn screens like we did with Freemarker+jQuery (=with bare hands, technology-wise).
Every new tool should accelerate the pace, but JS doesn’t seem to deliver.
The main reason JavaScript is still "popular", is that you are more or less forced to use it if you are targeting web browsers. And since web developers had to spend a lot of time learning that crap, combined with that whole DevOps culture, they ended up wanting to use JavaScript on the backend as well. Which is such a bad idea it's difficult to explain even.
People are starting to realize that this whole JavaScript ecosystem was a huge mistake. The level of complexity a typical Node framework introduces, compared to the benefits you get from using it, is just silly. A typical web developer doesn't understand this fact and naturally feels stupid when trying to figure this thing out.
Some are moving back to PHP or Ruby, others forward using Go or Elixir or such. Even ASP.NET is simpler to work with than Node and friends, and that is telling a lot.
Javascript is the only language that has continued to grow forever without becoming an "old" language in dev mindset.
One reason is the constant churn of tooling, another is the immaturity of everything, so every generation of devs have a place to add something.
Overall JS gains more than it loses.
This is similar to the concept that the first buggy language to capture mindshare will eventually fix its bugs and leave the initially more perfect competitors behind.