Simplicity in a language is great. JavaScript is actually a very simple language modulo a small set of irregularities. Most of these irregularities go away wit

Simplicity in a language is great. JavaScript is actually a very simple language modulo a small set of irregularities. Most of these irregularities go away with "use strict", which is basically the modern version of JavaScript anyhow. (And even more improvements are in the pipeline with future versions, which you are free to use for projects outside the browser!) While there are several reasons why I would not choose JavaScript first for "serious" programming (although it's pretty high on the list), these reasons are shared by most of the other popular languages like Python, Java and C++. (I also think all three of these languages are more complex than JavaScript.) If people who programmed "seriously" actually cared about simplicity and reasoning about code, we'd see much more Haskell in the wild. But instead we see the three unfortunate languages I listed above: Python, Java and C++. (Rounded out with mostly similar languages.)