> I understand JS is popular to hate, for a variety of reasons, but those reasons seem mostly to boil down to nerd cred. The "hate what's popular because being contrarian means I'm cool" crowd.
Then you're not paying attention. I'm not sure how you expect anyone to answer your "honest question" when you've already dismissed all the answers. It's not just fashion, programming language design is a real thing that it's possible to do badly or well, Javascript is a legitimately bad language, and Rust is a legitimately good language.
Learn Rust or another ML-family language, actually learn it to the point where you can write a decent, full-sized, idiomatic program in it. It won't be easy, but it's worth it. I mean, I could talk through all the reasons such languages are better, but it seems like you're already determined to dismiss them, so really the only way is to see for yourself.
Then you're not paying attention. I'm not sure how you expect anyone to answer your "honest question" when you've already dismissed all the answers. It's not just fashion, programming language design is a real thing that it's possible to do badly or well, Javascript is a legitimately bad language, and Rust is a legitimately good language.
Learn Rust or another ML-family language, actually learn it to the point where you can write a decent, full-sized, idiomatic program in it. It won't be easy, but it's worth it. I mean, I could talk through all the reasons such languages are better, but it seems like you're already determined to dismiss them, so really the only way is to see for yourself.