[tomjen3]

How much JS have you actually written?

It is a crap language designed in an afternoon and nowhere near good enough to solve the problems we currently use it for.

Just a few things of my head: 'this', 'var', no integers, semicolons, no block scope.

[larholm]

I have written a lot of JS since my humble beginnings in 1997 where I wrote an "ajax" chat system running down to Netscape 2 and IE3.

There's no point in dismissing JS due to simple lexical issues; those have in no way prevented us from maturing the language use through idioms, patterns, tools and collective knowledge.

JS is more than good enough as a basis for CoffeeScript and Emscripten - so why should we care whether scope context or a lack of block scope can be initially confusing?

[batista]

"var" and "no block scope" are horrible.

"No integers" is bad.

"this" can swing either ways. It provides some cool possibilities.

"semicolons" however (either the presence or the removal of) is a totally inconsequential and trivial syntactic thing.

Removing semicolons doesn't even buy you what a small amount of syntactic sugar buys you. You saved a few keystrokes. Big fucking deal.

[VeejayRampay]

I'ver never understood how the "this" thing actually brings possibilities. If anything, it introduces unnecessary confusion about scoping/binding. Python and Ruby don't have "this" and do just fine.

[batista]

Well, Python has "self", that you have to explicitly pass. Not the best example.

[lucian1900]

But Python's methods already have self curried in. Class.foo(self, x) takes two arguments, but instance.foo(x) already has self bound, and only takes on argument.

This lets you do bar = instance.foo; bar(x) and it'll still work. Much more consistent.