It's a fantastic language for prototyping. If you want to try an algorithm, you sit down, write an astonishly small quantity of code and it just works. That's

It's a fantastic language for prototyping. If you want to try an algorithm, you sit down, write an astonishly small quantity of code and it just works. That's true of Python and Ruby as well, both of which have basic features that Javascript lacks like modules and namespaces, and don't have its silly misfeatures like implied global scope. Javascript may very well end up "winning", but that will be because of its ubiquity in browsers and not on technical merit.