Flexible compared to what? Given the circumstances, that's definitely damning with faint praise.

Flexible compared to languages that don't use prototypal inheritance. Metaprogramming is part of every-day use for js developers; and it's a frequently used (and yes, sometimes abused) tool. As a result, developers can significantly change the way the language itself functions.

While this is amazing for smaller groups of disciplined developers; it can certainly cause maintenance pain. So, I guess I'd flip it around and call it praise with faint damnation.

Ok, just curious. I use Lua quite a bit, and I find its mix of prototype-based OO and clean functional programming to be very practical, as well.

It sounds like other people find the same pragmatism in Javascript, but after learning Lua, I find Javascript really depressing - it had so much potential, but...it's like Lua's little brother whose mind never had a chance to fully develop (due to the browser wars). It's sad. Lua's design has been refined for 17 years, and ... Javascript was frozen after 2. Just reading about thruth-y and false-y types in Javascript makes me cringe.

Granted, Lua doesn't have the strangehold on web development that Javascript does (it was designed for scripting C/C++ instead, like Tcl), but I'm working on that.