[sklogic]

More expressive than a less imaginative subset of C. More expressive than assembler. Much less expressive than any decent high-level language.

Javascript is low level, primitive and clumsy. There is absolutely no excuse for it being so crappy.

If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.

[pcwalton]

> If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.

Are you aware who Filip Pizlo is?

[sklogic]

Of course - a low level guy. It is quite likely that he is either not exposed at all to any expressive languages or reject them out of ideological reasons (JikesRVM is quite a strong symptom of the latter case).

[pcwalton]

I have no idea what the Jikes RVM has to do with "ideology". The point is that you're trying to tell someone who has a significant academic and industrial PL pedigree that they don't know what an expressive language is.

You seem to have an intense dislike of JavaScript. I'll the first one to admit that JavaScript has a lot of problems. But not being expressive enough is not one of them. JS is, if anything, too dynamic and expressive.

[sklogic]

Yes, if he thinks that JS is expressive he does not know what is expressive. And his track record clearly lacks anything related to any expressive language. I can only explain it with an ideology, because ignorance is not an option here.

And, no, JS is not expressive. It got strict limits on an available level of abstraction (unless you go into eval, of course).