[dpavlenkov]

I've been programming for probably 17 years, since high school, and just recently I appreciated JavaScript. For all its shortcomings, it's beautiful. If you'd just understand it, you would be able to easily understand other languages, dynamic or otherwise.

[sushi]

If you'd just understand it, you would be able to easily understand other languages, dynamic or otherwise.

I am genuinely curious to know why you think so.

[dpavlenkov]

Sorry for delayed reply. I think so because JavaScript, with its prototype system, dynamic typing and closures, makes various famous language features and their implementations explicit, while other languages may hide their inner workings in the name of simplicity, safety, etc. Thus, by learning JavaScript first, one can bypass the reverence for OOishness espoused by Java or C#, and yet understand them better because "class", "type", "object" in JavaScript understood to be not atomic concepts, but constructable pieces of code. With JavaScript, one starts interacting with inner workings of the language very early in the learning process. Really, in which language one learns about events first? Remember "onClick"? Sure, interaction starts at level 0, but that's great because already the value of events is understood without writing a single "public static main voiid".