Every time I consider learning more JS because it's widely used I find myself between a rock and a hard place. It's popular but it probably shouldn't be and I don't want to contribute to it being used even more for whatever mad shit is being attempted now.

Why?

The language itself is… fine. It has some bad decisions baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And it has a pretty mature security model, which is a big help for embedded devices.

And given that so many embedded devices these days are talking to cloud services — that are probably running JS, but are at least communicating via JSON — being able to share some cross-platform code or tooling can help things go quicker and/or safer.

Edit: This is probably not a route for teams that are chronically tight on memory and choose to solve that by spending hundreds of dev-hours on optimizing code rather than adding BOM cost. But for teams that could stand to increase BOM cost as long as the savings on dev-hours make up for it… it could be an option.

I'll take python over JavaScript any day