[jonbeebe]

You bring up a good point, but as you know, there's a certain amount of intuitive knowledge that gets carried over when learning another programming language (which is why it's much easier to learn additional languages than it was the first one you spent a considerable amount of time with). The problem is, JavaScript does look a whole lot like the languages you mention, it's just that some things behave vastly differently (ie. function scoped variables, behavior of double equals, etc.), which is what causes the confusion and sometimes you don't learn about these things until they bite you at some point.