I've worked on a JavaScript engine and I'll admit that. The language actively fights optimization. Some of this is due to legacy features, some to inconvenient design decisions like mutable prototype chains. I have tremendous respect for everyone involved in getting JS performance to where it is today.

Perhaps it is. PHP is also typically ragged on for being "one of the worst", yet it runs the majority of the web. The common theme between JavaScript and PHP is that it's possible to write some pretty awful code, but that doesn't make it impossible to write _good_ code in either of them. Do we measure languages by the worst we can create with them, or the best we can create with them?

It's also easy to be "one of the worst" when there are only a handful of languages that see widespread use. You only need to be in the bottom 5 of 15 or so languages, but my point is that that may not imply that it's a bad language.