Your point is moot. You switched it from commercially viable to good or bad. Javascript really is not a good language, no matter how you put it. He wasn't arguing whether it was a good business decision.

In the context of building things, a good language is one that gives the best bang for time; and improves our chances of success.

JS sure has its warts. But it isn't really that hard to know what to avoid. Once you do that, it is expressive enough to write apps without sacrificing productivity. It has all the basics you'd need; higher-order functions, closures, decent performance etc. The big win though, is that it is the only truly cross-platform language available today.

The major difficulty today (on the server-side) is that JS has no language support for handling callback interspersed code. This will be mostly resolved in ES6, due next year. We use ES6 features today, via flags.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I have no problem with the people who wrote Tessel programming my oven. Even in Javascript.

I also have no problem with a Javascript Kiddie programming my oven in Javascript. AS LONG AS HE/SHE COULD HAVE ALSO DONE IT IN SCALA/OCAML/CLOJURE/HASKELL.

> I also have no problem with a Javascript Kiddie programming my oven in Javascript. AS LONG AS HE/SHE COULD HAVE ALSO DONE IT IN SCALA/OCAML/CLOJURE/HASKELL.

What are you getting at with that?