True. I think the best characteristic of a programming language is that you can do really cool stuff with it that makes you want to learn to program, and enjoy

True. I think the best characteristic of a programming language is that you can do really cool stuff with it that makes you want to learn to program, and enjoy the results. Javascript has a monopoly on doing cool stuff in a web browser, so for that reason alone it makes it fun to learn. Heck, thousands of programmers (myself included, come to think of it) got started on programming because of "DHTML" and script kiddy DOM manipulations back in the days of Netscape. It was a gateway language. Fortunately I learned the fundamentals more thoroughly in Scheme...