A silver lining is that Javascript code will run on any modern browser+OS and can be created with nothing but a text editor. Even though this is many degrees of abstraction from facing the bare metal that was there in the 80s and 90s, it's better than nothing.

Windows XP (since SP2? )came with a C# compiler and it was pretty much ignored, CSC.exe.

A bit less with Perl and Python under *nixes where the Idle was about two clicks away.

With C# you would get far more performance and much better support.