JavaScript is to programming languages what English is to natural languages.
You heard me!

The joke is that it should've been "you've heard me" or smth? I don't get it. Anyway, it should've been python. There's no language closer to English than python and therefor a great language since languages are for humans, not computers

Yes, they both Just Shit.

nah. english is beautiful, elegant and efficient.

i'd rather compare it with french. overblown, nobody knows what is pronounced how exactly, it doesn't exactly sound very pretty, and it's but a distant echo of the glory of its ancestors.

also, in local slang, "french" is a synonym for oral sex - which is very fitting, since javascript sucks.

Obviously the only language closest to english is english

https://esolangs.org/wiki/English

@thebiochemic

Fusty English o' kicketh the bucket wench!

@tosensei To “french” is simply kissing with tongue.

English is basically the worst language. I spoke only that for most of my life. Inconsistent spellings. Inconsistent exceptions to syntax. Crazy meaning flips. Verb nouns. Frequent borrowing from other languages. And nobody who speaks English actually follows the grammar rules.

Then when I started Spanish as an adult I was stunned at how much I could predict the parts of the language that I didn’t know. It has some exceptions… but a tiny bit compared to english. I can get spellings even if I have never seen something spelled because of phonetics. It is mind boggling how crazy English is by comparison.

@retoor it wasn’t really meant to be a joke. "You heard me!" is just a way of saying "yes that’s what I said, don’t be surprised"
My point being, JS is a widespread language just like English is. JS is the language most programmers have to dabble with at some point in their career, just like many people have to learn some English (in their jobs for example, or while traveling). There are many JS frameworks just like there are many flavors of English. Both JS and English serve capitalism: English is the language of business, JS gets the job done quick and dirty for impatient stakeholders.

@tosensei every natural language has the potential of being beautiful, elegant and efficient when employed intelligently. French is a beautiful language. French spoken on the streets sounds disgusting. I can say the same of German or Spanish.

@tosensei English phonology is so fucked that speech recognition software usually converts the audio directly to words, and speech synthesis software converts words to audio.

English is an ideographic language with 1 million symbols.

There is one objectively correct JavaScript, the ES standard. There's no single objectively correct English, no matter how much the Brits insist that their rules are correct because theirs is an ancestor of all the others.

@irene i wrote "local slang". in german, "französisch" is a euphemism for oral sex.

@black-kite as a native german speaker i can assure you that there is no way german has the potential to be "beautiful".

@tosensei I find Austrian to be quite pleasant to the ear, though completely impenetrable to my limited German knowledge. Much like Irish or Welsh, actually.

@lorentz your ear must like abuse, then

Don't care. It puts bread on my table.