Agreed.

To be a strong candidate for a web scripting language you need three things:

* native lexical scope. This is how all web technologies work.

* Minimal reliance on white space as syntax. The language needs to be portable. Overloading white space as syntax makes a language more brittle, particularly in distribution.

* Immediate interpretation without a prior static compile step. This keeps the code open to examination and minimizes compile time delays.

Find another language that doesn't have all the stupid crap that JavaScript has and yet still excels in those three points and I will agree upon a replacement.

While I don't agree with your second point, which seems to be there purely to exclude Python, I'll run with it so as not to devolve into religious war territory.

How about Lua?

A line terminator on *nix isn't a line terminator on Windows, which is a big deal if line termination ends a statement, and that assumes the file isn't modified in transit.

Yet somehow, Python doesn't have this problem - it simply treats both types of line terminators as valid. So do all other modern languages that rely on whitespace.

And semicolons are optional in JavaScript, makes it whitespace sensitive I suppose.

Yes and no.

The language specification requires the use of semicolons. If a semicolon is not supplied the interpreter will insert it for you. That magical insertion step is referred to as ASI. I don't remember if ASI is mentioned in the spec (as I don't think it is), but at the very least it is a de facto standard as missing ASI breaks the web.

As stupid as all that sounds... semicolons are actually required to terminate statements in JavaScript.

And yet somehow the web doesn't break when one programmer uses \r\n while another uses \n. What was your original point about line terminators in this context?

I suppose that goes to how the language defines line termination and whether that language is OS aware. JS is completely independent of its execution context. Python may achieve this as well, and if so, then I am wrong in my thoughts about Python.

Here is how JavaScript does this:

* https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/#sec-source-text

* https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/#sec-line-termin...

ASI is defined in the spec here: https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/#sec-automatic-s...

> JS is not particularly accessible to beginners and makes it easy to write bad/dangerous code

That describes just about every programming language ever.