Oh, and how is writing code in Javascript possibly better than, say, typing fully-namespaced XML markup with your eyeballs on a keyboard made of broken glass?

As a language (i.e. excluding shitty browser stuff), JavaScript has got quite a few cool features.

It's certainly not the best language in the world, but it's a lot better than it's given credit for.

I will allow that there are some nice features, like first-class functions. And it facilitates jQuery, which is very nice. But for proper object-oriented programming it's pretty much fucked. And its array handling is a hideous nightmare. And jQuery lacks the array handling niceties of Prototype.js, and Scriptaculous lacks 99% of what's in jQuery UI and associated plug-ins.

 

If the W3C and the browser people could get their acts together and unleash Javascript 2.0 on the world, we might be getting somewhere. But I have no faith that this will ever come to pass.

I could never, ever, get on with jQuery. Mootools is fantastic, and has a UI library called Mocha that... I've never used. Hm.