While "better" is of course subjective in many, many ways, Javascript on V8 via Node is much faster in most computations: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

Obviously, performance isn't always a good reason to pick a language. I'm certainly not looking to write stuff in C, despite the performance benefits. Just pointing out that there are some solid reasons to prefer JS to PHP. ClojureScript alone is enough of a reason for me.