Is Javascript and other web languages the future of programming?

If you have any interest in doing web programming, JavaScript is your future.

Some languages let you avoid writing JS directly (TypeScript, PureScript, Elm, CoffeeScript, BuckleScript, etc), but they don't make it go away. Other tools let you compile non-web languages (C, C++, Rust, etc) to a web technology different from JavaScript (WebAssembly), but JS is still an important part of that ecosystem. And the web itself doesn't appear to be going anywhere and is in fact worming its way into more and more traditional programming domains. So while there is enough JS hatred to continue waging the war, there is no sign JS will ever be defeated.

On the other hand, Python is nearly as popular as Java, so it probably has the critical mass to stay relevant for a really long time. Its only weakness is that its motivating use case is data analysis (Pandas, NumPy, SciKit, etc), so while a lot of those people have bought in, the next generation of scientists may jump to something else to be cooler than their advisors (as previous generations jumped from Fortran to C (or SAS) then C to Python (possibly via R).

On the other other hand, you should never worry about which language to learn because you should learn as many of them as you can. It's perfectly fine to focus on Python now, just don't get stuck there (or anywhere).

/r/learnprogramming Thread