Comment by wruza

Semantics and configurability is what what makes a language great. JS doesn’t have function environments, i.e. every unlexical lookup goes to global/window and that cannot be redirected. It doesn’t have green threads (at least). There are generators, but one cannot just yield without marking all the functions generators too (async/await in modern terms). Stack traces are lost when generators throw(). JS has no good introspection — you can do some Reflect, but cannot e.g. write a module that has a function, that when called enumerates all functions in a caller module and exports them by specific criteria. JS can’t properly substitute objects with proxies. It can catch simple existing key accesses, but can’t enumerate keys or arrays. There was handler.enumerate, but it was deprecated. Vue, which was written by no fools I think, cannot “app.array[3] = v” or “app.newkey = v”. It cannot dynamically watch an entire app too, all structure has to be defined before Vue().

Other problems exist, which are just stupid (null/undefined, in/of, ===, ;, this, etc) or minor design choices like coersion and lexical rules. But these above are stoppers for turning JS into something great. It is now a BASIC-level language with scoping and sugar. Yeah, you can write like that snippet presented in an article, but you are forever stuck with doing all things by hand, from asyncing to orm, from exporting to update scheduling. I don’t find that great in any way, especially when that is the only semantics you have in a browser.