> It is nice in a few respects: I like the prototype-based object system...but I hate their execution. A lot of the language is like that. It nearly ruined Lua for me: every time I write Lua, I spend maybe 10% of the time thinking about the Lua program and the other 90% thinking about how much nicer the world would be if we'd adopted Lua instead of Javascript.

Lua was after my time.
Good things about JavaScript: maybe a little sloppy, but easy to actually do things with. Runs in browser, so all important programming write-execute-write cycles were fast.
Lua was after my time.

Of course, the main lesson of JavaScript for me was that other than fun, toys and gimmicks, one should always do everything server side, never trust the client with more than simple HTML. I effin loved PHP: best online docs I ever encountered, always easy to find out anything about the language, and it just worked and did things right. That was before HTML5 with layers and such, so it involved frequent whole-page re-rendering, but it was worth it to be sure a page would work on all the different browsers out there.

Now they've got stuff where afaik you can dynamically, asynchronously update just a snippet of a page. I sure would have enjoyed that.