>>12
Have you ever actually tried doing anything with SpiderMonkey?
Seriously. It sucks. There's no proper standardization for anything that isn't related to the ECMA core or DOM, no functionality for loading external modules -- in fact, if you want to get anything besides, say,
print(), you have to compile it into the interpreter and rebuild the damn thing. And SpiderMonkey's disk I/O isn't even enabled unless you enable some non-default compile time flags. What the fuck use is that?!
>>10
That is also true. PHP
is shit, and it even does have library support. In fact there is even a Gtk wrapper for PHP, so it's ahead of JS in that respect, but it doesn't change the fact that it is a hideously shitty language to develop in.
Case in point: you can make 3D games with Python. (the most well-known example of this being Eve Online; see also Panda3D and PyGame) Show me something like that with Javascript. Right off the top of my head, I know Python's been used for air traffic control, as well as mission-critical government and military systems. And I'm sure that all of those use Javascript too...
for their web pages. In fact, I can't think of a single non-trivial example of something written in, or even embedding Javascript, that isn't somehow tethered to a web page.
Javascript fails in exactly the same way that Lua fails: its developers, instead of harnessing the language's potential, are sticking their fingers in their ears, going LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, and rejecting anything that doesn't fit neatly in their restricted world-view of what they want it to be. Python embeds just as easily as it extends; it's highly flexible and powerful. Javascript could be all of those things and more; a standalone JS implementation with decent FFI and a useful standard library would probably kick the shit out of Python, but is it going to happen? Of course not, because all the Javascript developers have web 2.0 on the brain.