Gotta say, ive done magical things in Javascript. NodeJS in particular can do damn near anything you set your mind to, and it doesnt give a damn if you use tab or 4 spaces.
They do share a significant commonality, though; they are both interpreted languages, rather than compiled. Sure, you can compile them, but they are meant to be run interpreted so you can quickly and easily tweak and change things and not have to wait for compilation to see the results. In that regard they are very comparable.
Pretty much all online service APIs (Google APIs, Facebook and so on) out there are text-based.
Granted, JSON formatted text, but still absolutelly human readable text.
The reason for that is because it's agnostic of the machine architectures (stuff like endianess) on both sides.
The really crazy stuff in banking are the old binary protocols (like EDF) from the time when bandwidth was way less than now (so, the early 90s and earlier).
I had to do a project once with JavaScript. I did not enjoy the experience. In my opinion, a language where you need a reference to tell true from false is a bad language. So maybe JavaScript is the JavaScript of languages.
I'm not a programmer but I took a class in JavaScript. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by reference, I don't recall that feature of the language. Can you explain?