[superbobry]

[1] can give you some insight on the dark side of JS. Also, avoiding JS in some way or another is not that hard, esp. since there're a lot of languages which compile to JS, most notably CoffeeScript and ClojureScript.

  * [1] http://wtfjs.com 
  * [2] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS

[dagw]

As much as I love CoffeeScript, it's not a substitution for learning JavaScript. CoffeeScript is basically just JavaScript with a prettier syntax and if you don't understand JavaScript you won't understand CoffeeScript.

[cometc]

That is completely true, you can't treat CoffeeScript as a replacement for learning Javascript in fact I'd say you need to have a pretty strong understanding of JavaScript to really use CoffeeScript well. That said CoffeeScript does some nice things to prevent typical small js errors for newer devs.

[pooriaazimi]

Very true. I love CoffeeScript very, very much. It's my favorite language - I like it even better than ruby, if you believe me! I like using indentation instead of stupid 'end's that only God knows are ending a loop or a def or something else, I like the use of ... instead of * (for splats), and a few other things.

But, as much as I like CS and hate (really hate) JS, I have to agree with you wholeheartedly. You must know JavaScript well. Variable/function hoisting won't bite you in CS, but other JS idiocies will.

Read Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" at least twice (and take a lot of notes). It's the best no-bullshit book on JavaScript (the language, not "how to use JavaScript in Node/front-end web design") around.

[codygman]

If you like how CoffeeScript is tab delimited, you might also enjoy python.