Actually, I have NEVER denied that JavaScript performance is pretty good. In fact, I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in my many, many posts. Okay, it’s a tiny percentage. So what? At least I did mention it.

The reason I didn’t mention it more is because performance is largely irrelevant. First of all, for the vast majority of web applications, performance is a non-issue. That’s why Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby have been so immensely successful. (And why Smalltalk has been excellent for web development since the early 2000s.)

Second, when it comes to performance, it’s hard to beat hand-coded assembly language. Nevertheless, very few people today would advocate for using assembly language over C, Java, C#, and Go. Performance isn’t everything and people generally prefer languages that make their job easier.

As I’ve said many, many times, JavaScript is a crap language. Even if its performance is extraordinary, so what? That’s why I advocate for using JavaScript as the assembly language of the web. For this, it’s quite good, and it enables me to use fantastic languages like Amber, ClojureScript, Dart, Elm, Haxe, Kotlin, Scala.js, and others.

Third, WebAssembly has arrived. Once it gains much more industry support, JavaScript’s performance advantage will be substantially reduced, if not entirely eliminated. Other languages will be able to perform just as well natively in the web browser.

You’re looking for examples? They’re coming!