In case Eich reads your comment: given that it had to be done in ten days and "look like Java", JavaScript is a fine langauge. (But yeah, compared to languages

In case Eich reads your comment: given that it had to be done in ten days and "look like Java", JavaScript is a fine langauge. (But yeah, compared to languages that were designed over years obviously it's incredibly bad.) To quote Eich (from here[1]): " Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date -- Y2K bugs and all! Gosling...). Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_calls http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self). I'll do better in the next life. " [1] Edit: jwz.org intercepts HN links. See mjgoeke's comment.