"It is good enough that you can deploy hordes of programmers to produce crappy software that sort of works. And that is good enough for making money."

Well, I respect the author for he is a Fellow at MIT. But that's quite unfair. So Gmail is a crappy software? People have done great stuff with JavaScript and it's not for money. For me, though I neglected the language for some years as I always thought it's a toy language (lesson leanred: always try rather than listening to complaints) but despite its shortcomings the language has a strange appeal. Also, I know for a fact that good JavaScript developers are not in abundance. The way author has tried to compare Java & ActionScript--which is totally beyond my comprehension. I think I'm moderately competent but I can show author quite a few things that can be expressed quite elegantly in JavaScript than say Java. I'm actually surprised as to why someone at Software Design Group at MIT would bash a language with comments like "crappy software that sorts of work. And that is good enough for making money" ;(