javascript, still a thing?

Javascript is a great, and expressive language. You can be as succinct or vague as you like, you can scratch the surface or leverage a really powerful event loop.

alert('Annoying popup');

Lots of people just think of the annoying browser popup, but you can deeper than that.

Classes can be defined, albeit through some syntax sugar over the top of javascript’s prototype inheritance.

'use strict';

class Person { 
  constructor(firstname, lastname) { 
    this.firstname = firstname; 
    this.lastname = lastname; 
  }

  get name() {
    return this.firstname + ' ' + this.lastname;
  }
}

Anonymous functions, thats right, javascript has lambda abstractions.

console.log(() => (new Person('thejs', 'ninja')).name);

You want a web server? nodejs / iojs runtimes can do this out of the box.

const http = require('http');
const hostname = 'localhost'; 
const port = 8080;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.end('nodejs is serving you\n'); 
});

server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
  console.log('Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/'); 
});

Or maybe you want to interact with some real world electronics using a well established library with native bindings, or you can build your own.

var five = require("johnny-five"); 
var board = new five.Board();

board.on("ready", () => {
  (new five.Led(13)).strobe(); 
});

Embrace it, it’s a thing.

In short, javascript is a powerful abstraction language. Embrace it, it’s a thing.