[JoshTriplett]

It's more that I'd like browsers not doing an absurd amount of unnecessary work and overhead. Leaving aside opinions on JavaScript as a scripting language for humans, it's not a sensible intermediate format for compiled binaries. It happens to work as a (very impressive) hack.

[acqq]

Even if it doesn't appear to be for those who don't consider the whole context it's a reasonably effective intermediate format. The current success of it among the vendors proves that.