A lot of people seem to be saying "build a small project" and I'm not saying that doesn't work but...., but, something I've experienced a lot is that people stick to their old ways, myself included.<p>As a C/C++ programmer I used to hate JavaScript (pre ES5). I didn't like it's function based scoping system. I didn't like it's prototype based class system. I loathed using it and wrote as little as possible, only enough to make a small WebGL demo or add a tiny feature to my blog. I was basically trying to use JavaScript as C/C++ and hating it.<p>At some point though I flipped. I actually started using JavaScript and playing to its features. I embraced prototypical inheritance and all the ways it's more flexible than class based. I embraced JavaScript's dynamic typing using, where appropriate, the ability to easy wrap APIs, to write more generic and flexible code. I also really loved closures and building functions that closed over data, something that, at the time, C/C++ didn't have.<p>I also really enjoyed that, at least in the browser, JavaScript is bundled with a lot of CROSS PLATFORM functionality (graphics, GPU access, audio, video, networking, UI) that pretty much no other language has and of course that I could share anything I made with just a link.<p>Then ES5 to current shipped with better scoping, import, map/reduce, promises, async/await<p>But, I bring this up because I still work with 30-40 people that, even in 2021, they work on the browser teams (Chromium, WebKit, Firefox) and yet none of them really know JavaScript. They all still have the same attitude that I had 15yrs ago. They avoid it as much as possible and they treat it like C/C++. Some of them have been doing this for 15+ years. They've written 1000s of even 10s of 1000s of lines of JavaScript to create tests for the features they're implementing but they still having really "learned the language".