If you want to see what Javascript could have become without premature standardization, check out Lua (http://www.lua.org/ http://www.lua.org/). It doesn't get

If you want to see what Javascript could have become without premature standardization, check out Lua (http://www.lua.org/ http://www.lua.org/). It doesn't get that much hype because it isn't married to the web, but it's popular in other niches, particularly the gaming industry. It's designed for scripting C / C++ applications, but also works well as a standalone language. It's like a tasteful mix of Python and Javascript, but without any of the fat. It's very dynamic, has a small, extremely portable, and high-performance implementation (in a ~200k C library), has prototype-based objects, a JSON-like native datatype, and a better JIT (http://luajit.org/ http://luajit.org/) than any JS implementation thus far. Recommended introduction: Ierusalimschy's _Programming in Lua, 2nd ed._ (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/ http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/).