I read these essays for the first time a some years ago at a time when I was being assigned to a Javascript project and, much to my own surprise, had gone from ridiculing the language to secretly kind of liking it. At the time I had been working with Java for 10+ years and Javascript had always been regarded as this inbred cousin from Kansas that you didn't really want to be seen in company with.
Anyway, reading Graham's essays on computer languages helped me understand that Javascript was actually one rung up the abstractness ladder compared to Java, and that the language that I had always considered to be limited was instead extremely flexible and hence, stronger.
BTW, a curious thing about Graham is that he measures the strength of a language by how many features it shares with Lisp. Hence, no language will ever surpass Lisp using that yardstick.