[ufo]

The problem with Javascript is that you basically can only use it to interact with websites (thus forcing people to also learn HTML and CSS along with it). There is also the problem of it being a language full of warts and implementation incompatibilities and missing lots of features you would want from a modern language.

[Jare]

BASIC had plenty such warts, incompatibilities and lack of 'modern' features. Javascript is still not as immediately available and direct to use as the BASICs of old were. As a beginner, to easily make anything useful and interesting (by today's standards) in Javascript, you need to run it in a browser as a saved file, wrap it in some html, and add a bunch of boilerplate (create a canvas, make stuff move, access the DOM).

[mwill]

JavaScript w/Nodejs is pretty great.

I'm pretty language agnostic, but I'll admit I've briefly fantasized about an ECMAScriptish language that shared all it's feature, down to the object model, weird hybrid half FP/OO and prototypical inheritance, etc, plus some of the propose features and other cool junk like clean macro support, operator overloading, etc, and squared up some of the crazier stuff like weird definitions of truthiness, and looser type coercion.

Throw in a way to set up bindings, GUI toolkit or whatever, and a way to build distributable standalone binaries, and I'd use that as my go to language, esp to prototype and hack out ideas.

It's a fun way to just dump ideas and a few changes would make it a great all-round language worth favouring.