I feel like being bullied for having to learn Javascript to do web programming. I wish there was a push towards supporting arbitrary languages for doing web development.
That being said, JavaScript is a powerful tool, if wielded correctly. It's so flexible. In a lot of ways, it's like a pizza. One man orders a pizza with anchovies, another with green peppers. And on and on. Eventually it's like they've got two completely different dinners.
I have tried to read code that was translated to Javascript using some source-to-source compilers and they are very hard to understand. On the other hand for a language like C, it is very easy to understand the output ( assembly ). Don't get me wrong, understanding the intricacies of assembly for each processor architecture is a difficult process, but the rules that define assembly language itself are not so, there is an opcode and some operands and each instruction performs an action on the operands or stored state in various registers. Javascript ( at least for me ) is too high-level to attempt to read a machine translated output. Programmers need to know at least one level below the abstraction to which they are programming to.