Why JavaScript is AWESOME

Whats unfortunate is that the reasons they list JavaScript as a cool language are not for necessarily exotic features...we (being corporate slaves like me) are just forced to write in "engineering" languages (a very specific subset of the available languages, I might add) that don't don't support those features.

I agree, though, that JavaScript is an amazing language. I love JavaScript. It took me some time to warm up to it thanks to my experience but now that I have I am absolutely in love.

One caveat though: I need a robust framework to make it useable. Unfortunately the implementation of JS (from a DOM perspective, not an actual interpreter perspective) is pretty poor out of the box. There is nothing out there saying that the features in, say, jQuery can't be baked in to the "standard DOM" (not sure what the term for that is but I think you get what I mean).

But from a features perspective JS is amazing. Would I like a job writing only JS? Hah, no -- although they exist (ask Jive Software). I think it's a tool that all web dev's should know, though, and they should know it well.