Depends on how JS evolves. It got a pretty serious setback when ES4 blew up and everyone went back to the drawing board on ES5 and ES6; the ES6 launch makes it

Depends on how JS evolves. It got a pretty serious setback when ES4 blew up and everyone went back to the drawing board on ES5 and ES6; the ES6 launch makes it (I think) better for most use cases than Python/Ruby/et al, because the VM is an order-of-magnitude faster than most of the popular choices and ES6 is a reasonably usable language even for someone unused to Javascript's current quirks: it has a real module system, the class syntax is sane and similar to how every other lang does it, the confusing `this` binding is fixed with arrow-functions, generators and Promises get rid of deeply-nested callback chains, `let` and `const` get rid of confusing variable hoisting, etc. Google and Microsoft are both very seriously experimenting with typed variants of JS (TypeScript from Microsoft and SoundScript from the V8 team), and Mozilla had in fact already proposed adding static typing back in the ES4 days, so I wouldn't be surprised if the next couple of versions of the ES spec include static types. The future for JS is brighter than you think — although it's brighter only because it looks like JS will become a better language, not because of JS in its current, mostly-still-ES5 state.