[msteigerwalt]

From my experience, "most" of those JavaScript developers who "hate JavaScript" are in fact front-end developers who hate writing JavaScript for websites, since they struggle daily with issues such as cross-browser compatibility and inconsistent DOM implementations, which have nothing to do with JavaScript at all, and can't be fixed by a different syntax.

It's also compounded because the majority of front-end developers write their code procedurally for each application component, which creates a terrible nest of repetitive and error-prone code.

They feel the pain, don't know how to solve it, so switch to a different syntax, blaming that as the root cause of the problem.

But feeling enough pain to viscerally HATE a language, as many front-end developers do, is not something that can simply come from the syntax of the language and the fact that the equality operator does type conversion and whatever small list of gripes users have. Most other languages (including CoffeeScript!) have a similarly-sized set of flaws and aren't nearly as derided.

[Me1000]

Correlation not causation.

As someone who has built large scale JavaScript applications, and has a lot of experience in other languages I really don't like JavaScript. My experience is that a lot of people know JavaScript, but very few people actually like it... Those people generally make writing JavaScript their day job.

Overall, cross browser js isn't really that difficult anymore and I rarely see people complaining about that. Of course, I've been part of the AltJS community for a while, and the people I follow closely are not front end developers.