I wasn't aware that Python and JavaScript were in competition. Or for that matter, that JS is by any stretch of the imagination "invested in performance".
People don't use Python because of its merits as a programming language. They use it because of the excellent standard library, Scipy, Sage, etc. While it may be that in a decade JavaScript has built an ecosystem to match, I frankly don't see why anybody would bother. We already have Python, why would we invest such effort into a less suitable language?
JavaScript is tolerated by web developers, because they're forced to use it on the client, and so there's a benefit to also using it on the server to prevent duplication of effort. But there is absolutely no reason why non-web developers would or will ever use it outside of that niche.
OK maybe not everything will be a web app, but pretty much everything that isn't some deep driver-level boot code or embedded firmware is already almost always part of some sort of web app, and the stuff that isn't is pretty much all written in C/C++.
When is the last time you wrote a Python program that didn't interact over TCP or equivalent with some other process? And how often was that other process not something at least nominally webby?
> When is the last time you wrote a Python program that
> didn't interact over TCP or equivalent with some other
> process?
My last python program was a set of scripts to help me analyze music harmony. Entirely CLI based.
Before that? objcfix - a refactoring tool. Again, CLI based.
That's not counting the multitude of small scripts I write on a day to day basis. I've written a large amount of Python code, and very little of it interacts with a network.
Put it this way: Python was invented in 1991, the same time as the web. It didn't become a good tool for making websites until after 2005 when Django arrived. So, what did people do with it before then, if not make websites?
> but pretty much everything that isn't some deep driver-
> level boot code or embedded firmware is already almost
> always part of some sort of web app, and the stuff that
> isn't is pretty much all written in C/C++.
This is not the reality we live in. There's:
* Games (either written in C++, Objective-C or Java nowadays, plus a bit of Lua)
* Big Software: MS Office, Photoshop, Avid, Logic, InDesign, etc. Written in C++
* Scientific Computing: Written in C++, Matlab, Mathematica, Python
* Financial Computing: C, C++, Java, and a tiny spot of OCaml.
* iPhone/Android Apps: again, Objective-C or Java.
* "Enterprise Software", whatever that is. Java.
And as you point out, embedded software. Everything around us runs Embedded C.
The future is the same as the present: full of a rich and diverse selection of languages.
People don't use Python because of its merits as a programming language. They use it because of the excellent standard library, Scipy, Sage, etc. While it may be that in a decade JavaScript has built an ecosystem to match, I frankly don't see why anybody would bother. We already have Python, why would we invest such effort into a less suitable language?
JavaScript is tolerated by web developers, because they're forced to use it on the client, and so there's a benefit to also using it on the server to prevent duplication of effort. But there is absolutely no reason why non-web developers would or will ever use it outside of that niche.