[krapp]

You may have to learn to put up with it. It's not the end of the world. It's just a scripting language, just suck it up and deal.

There are any number of js frameworks which will probably abstract away most of the headaches you might have, and depending on what you're actually trying to accomplish, you may not need a lot of js at all. If you don't want to use client-side templating, for instance, and there's no reason to, then just skip it. Push as much of it to the backend in the language of your choice as you can.

But javascript, when you need scripting in the browser, is kind of unavoidable.

Also consider http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor... - your expectations from working with other languages may be getting in the way of your writing javascript properly and effectively.

(or do what a lot of other people do and work with a language that compiles to js and you can pretend you live in an alternate universe where you're not working with javascript even though you really are.)