[Turing_Machine]

Agree 100%. You don't have to install anything. It's on every machine with a modern web browser, even mobile devices.

It's even got the "nastiness" factor down. :-)

We're also starting to see things like Snap written in pure JavaScript/HTML5:

http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html

[olaf]

Not to forget the rapid evolution of the language, ECMAScript 6 will get ... 1. classes http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:classes 2. modules http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules and more (http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proposals).

[dangayle]

Javascript doesn't even need classes as a prototype-based (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype-based_programming) language.

I get the feeling that because Javascript is in such high demand, a lot of "classicly trained" programmers have started taking it up and started b*tching about how things aren't they way they're used to.

That's probably the same group of people who on this board complain about Python's indentation syntax, etc.

[Evbn]

Prototypes aren't classes and they aren't always what you want, and conventions can't always be optimized by the compiler as well as structured language elements.