Indeed it does. Its one of the hardest modern language I have ever tried to teach someone. All the minor trip-wires (like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-languag...), but the worst part is that there are always at least 5 ways to do something.

Out of those 5, two is bad and should never be done but you would be lucky if any book mention this fact. Of the three left, only two is ever considered as good through noone can agree which one is the preferred way. One solution ends up being neither hated or praised enough to be worth mentioning in a book or ranting article.

So to figure out which ones to avoid, and which ones to use, one can either use what ever superstitious choice one learned by a previous teacher, or read massive amount of javascript articles and books to get a "feel" for it (no guarantee through). When you try to teach a student all the different methods, they will get information overload so one is simply forced to avoid large part of the language and hope they act like "don't think, just do what I say".

Python in the browser would just be a clear improvement over javascript.