You seem to be missing my point - which is not to criticize JS (I use JS frequently, and actually like a lot of it) - I'm merely suggesting that its success is not due to the language itself and its merits, but to the domain that it has found popularity in, the browser. Were there a competing language to JS (not Flash, not Java - but a comparable language for scripting the DOM), we might have a real comparison. How can you really gauge 'popularity' when there is no real choice?