JavaScript encourages abstraction layers: Abstraction layers such as JQuery, Objective-J and GWT have become very popular recently. This is the age old debate

JavaScript encourages abstraction layers: Abstraction layers such as JQuery, Objective-J and GWT have become very popular recently. This is the age old debate that has raged since Lisp and C expressive vs imperative, people who favor imperative languages will look at languages like Lisp and JavaScript as the devils tongue. While people who favor expressive languages will feel unduly restrained in the puritanical world of imperatives. If you go back further than that, it gets back to the old science vs art debate. One style treats programming as a science the other treats it as an art. Both are right and both are wrong, because expressing human though is an art but computation theory is a science, what we do is somewhere in the middle. I am personally an artist, therefore I love expressive languages. I see the beauty of languages like JavaScript despite their warts. Where the author sees the above quote about jQuery and sites it as a drawback of JavaScript I see it as one of it's greatest strengths, the fact that developers can express themselves so fully that they can design mini-languages in it, is a testimonial to it's power. Is the world really worse off because jQuery exists. I would say it has contributed quite a bit of usefulness. For me the one big one with JavaScript is the variable scope issue, I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would have designed the languadge to ignore scope blocks when it comes to variables and move that scope up to the function level. There are a lot of small WTF with it, but to me that is the big WTF where they thinking. Many of the gripes in this article have everything to do with the authors personal preference and noting to do with true WTF's in JavaScript. As such it comes of as written by an uninformed, opinionated elitist.