I agree. As a beginner - and even as a professional, in an average-case situation - what you need in terms of abstractive power and optimization potential tends

I agree. As a beginner - and even as a professional, in an average-case situation - what you need in terms of abstractive power and optimization potential tends to be something akin to a classic microcomputer Basic, plus some modern API calls. You're already way ahead of the game when you consider JS in that light. You can write a lot of practical, maintainable JS that only uses arithmetic, string manipulation, branches, loops, arrays and simple function calls. POD objects, too, if you get a little more fancy. Teaching towards that subset is also a healthy instruction in rule of least power - once you grasp how to use the basics, you have a fighting chance of picking up most other languages too. It's way more unhealthy to guide newbies into cargo cult thoughts about "proper" something-something design(insert favorite methodology here) - a learner has to make their own mistakes to learn properly, but they should do so from within the subset of programming concepts that predate current languages, because those are the things that have lasted through multiple generations of software. If we consider Python, Ruby, JS, C#, and Java - the design of most of their core features was locked down all the way back in the 1990's. So all the new ideas they brought to the table tend to be "baby implementations", frozen in a half-correct state of refinement. But the things they got _really_ right tend to be the things that were there and usable, but not refined so well in prior languages.