[ianstormtaylor]

To be fair it wasn't hated "when it came out" because of it's ugliness. The part that made it unusable was browser fragmentation. But, you no longer have to write ridiculously complicated switch-riddled code because of better browser support, standardization and libraries that do it for you.

[rdtsc]

True browser fragmentation was a big problem and however I still don't remember (maybe I was just not aware) of anyone praising the language itself. That is sort of the argument -- it is a beautiful and great language. So regardless of implementation those qualities should have been there.