Absolutely agreed. I really love JavaScript for a lot of reasons, but it still astonishes me that that our lingua franca was designed in 10 days. In 1995. For NETSCAPE.

I'm not so sure I would describe the mishmash as unambiguously depressing. It's also pretty inspiring seeing people using the mishmash in a sort of bricolage kind of way. One thinks of libraries like Underscore and Backbone that seek to account for some of the "deficiencies" in JS.

And don't even get me started on CoffeeScript.

But I think we would both agree that it's strange that no one has come along attempting to really REALLY break the mold by designing a new browser from the ground up that wasn't tied to JavaScript and the DOM (and maybe not even HTML!).

You go first :)