Plus I agree with the other (downvoted) commenter that whitespace would be a huge annoyance. A language for the web has to be something robust to copying and pasting to / from web pages.

Furthermore although I agree Python's limited lambda's make it slightly uglier to do some constructs, it's merely syntactic sugar.

First-order functions are the critical feature. Whether you are compelled to give them a name or not isn't critical.

JavaScript is great for event based programmming because of it's scoping rules. Python can't offer that.

That's why a few langang

Maybe you are referring to the fact that JS has an arguably better syntax for anonymous functions?

I think having implicit declarations is probably the worst mistake Python made. It just makes things so much more confusing.

Having to deal with getting the whitespace right while doing that could be annoying, and would also make the code much harder to read on the server side.

I think for this application, the more forgiving a language is about layout the better.