Javascript suffers the curse of popularity in spades. Most of its users today do not use it as a language at all, but instead as very light mechanism for gettin

Javascript suffers the curse of popularity in spades. Most of its users today do not use it as a language at all, but instead as very light mechanism for getting a web browser to do weird things. Using Javascript as a language isn't bad and I think that's worth talking about. Especially since putting more effort there may let Javascript take advantage of some of its popularity. Javascript is definitely microscopic compared to Ruby or Java. Lua, Smalltalk, Scheme have it handily beat on size, though. Furthermore, Haskell is absolutely lightyears ahead of Javascript in semantic niceness, but it succeeds there by being a much larger language, so YMMV.