Agreed. I think JS is quite a broken language that should probably be replaced. It won't be, but it probably should. I know Google thinks Dart could be that language but they're not even trying to put the VM into Chrome, so it's just another replacement that needs to be compiled.

I was complaining about some JS stuff (particularly the required writing of "use strict") in the #nodejs freenode irc chat the other day and someone asked me a way to help solve these issues without breaking 50 year old code. Thinking about it, I think a good attempt would be to create an HTML meta tag that would tell the browser to parse all JS in strict mode. Maybe there's something already out there. This is already possible in nodejs, but browser side I think it could be a big help in moving things forward.