In the context of building things, a good language is one that gives the best bang for time; and improves our chances of success. JS sure has its warts. But it

In the context of building things, a good language is one that gives the best bang for time; and improves our chances of success. JS sure has its warts. But it isn't really that hard to know what to avoid. Once you do that, it is expressive enough to write apps without sacrificing productivity. It has all the basics you'd need; higher-order functions, closures, decent performance etc. The big win though, is that it is the only truly cross-platform language available today. The major difficulty today (on the server-side) is that JS has no language support for handling callback interspersed code. This will be mostly resolved in ES6, due next year. We use ES6 features today, via flags.