The world of technology has little by little been taken over by the web, which (in my opinion) isn't necessarily a bad thing. What I don't like is that the main languages in the web are scripting languages that allow bad practices and, to some extent, encourage them. It wouldn't be so bad (at least for me) if this were limited to JavaScript on the client-side. My issue is that scripting has advanced even to the servers. Sure, you can use JSP, which is nice because it's a compiled language and it's more or less strict as to its mentality and paradigm, but Java isn't that popular in the web, what's popular are languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript (because someone thought it was a good idea to put JS on the server).

You see, at least at first when mobile phones started to become popular, they all use Java or some other stricter language, heck, you can program Android apps in C++ if you wanted to (although I wouldn't recommend it). Now companies figure that they can just make a web app and it will be just the same as having a mobile app, they'll just have to go to the website to see it. This, although true, limits the possible jobs of all developers to mostly web monkey work, where you pay less attention on functionality and more attention on aesthetics, which some people may enjoy, but I sure don't.

Essentially, scripting (and by scripting I mostly mean JavaScript, you Python and Ruby devs can calm down a bit) is allowing normies to begin entering our field without learning any good practices, or even the foundations of programming. Stop making it easier for people who don't care about the beauty of programming to get into programming, they don't deserve it. Why should someone who has no wish to learn of the beauty of painting enter a business where they will be painting?

Of course, I have no problem with them entering our industry, so long as they actually make an effort to learn good practices and choose a standard for their language. Otherwise you might be reading two JS projects from two different people, and the paradigms are so different you might think that's a whole different language! When I learn C++ I know that every C++ program will have essentially the same mentality to it.

I often get the impression that people who learn scripting languages are the same people who started off with game-makers because they didn't want to have to program the whole thing.

Of course, this is all a matter of opinion, I personally don't mind the essence of what scripting is, I just don't like the fact that it has basically no standards, and if it does, the language's interpreter doesn't enforce them (I believe the HTML & CSS are partly to blame for this, seeing that the browser often takes care of most errors so you don't have to fix them). It's not the computer's (or in this case, the web browser's) to interpret what I mean (even though it is called an interpreter), its job is to read my code and if something is not standard or doesn't make sense, it doesn't fix it for me, it gives me a big fat error in bold red text that tells me "Hey, this code is bad, you should change that!".