Yeah, I have to say that there are many things I love about Javascript. Even the quirky this pointer is at least interesting (though not particularly useful). Internally JS is very elegant IMHO and it is easy to write beautiful code in many different paradigms.

On the downside: Type coercion is always a bad idea. There is an inconsistency between built in types and user constructed types. It has terrible standard class libraries. It is verbose.

But I can name half a dozen other languages that suffer from these problems and more. Judicious use of a transpiler (like coffeescript) and choice of third party libraries will go a long way. Personally, I enjoy working in coffeescript more than Ruby specifically because of the first class functions.

Not the best programming language in the world, but not the worst either, IMHO. It's just unfortunate that some of the more obvious shortcomings weren't fixed early on.

It's also quite average for languages of that time to have first-class functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...