After finally getting over my fear of client-side programming, I finally built a project in JS last week.
I feel exactly the same as you: Javascript, as a language, just does nothing to help you. You've done a better elucidation of it than I could, I just always felt JS was being unhelpful; be it getting the value of an object, be it the inheritance syntax (I have no issues with the prototypal aspect, just the way you express it), lack of good ways to move through a list, the somewhat difficult to understand scoping of 'this'...
It's not that any one thing is especially broken, it's just that all added up I feel like it's not finished, and I'm not Getting Stuff Done as I do with Python.
Google Closure seems to go some of the way there, but I get the feeling that's probably just adding some syntactic sugar to make swallowing the bitterness a bit easier.
This is why I've been dismayed to see JS taking off on the server side. Maybe there's some clever engineering behind Node and maybe taking a free ride on V8 is a lot less work than building a similarly robust VM for Ruby or Python but it just seems wrong to build the next generation of apps on such a flawed language.
The explosion of the web opened the doors to new languages after a long stagnation of client-side code. Why let an accident of browser development history dictate the tools we use for the next 5-10 years?
Node probably will end up like both the JVM and client-side JS have become - a compile targets for better languages. Not ideal, but good enough I expect.
I feel exactly the same as you: Javascript, as a language, just does nothing to help you. You've done a better elucidation of it than I could, I just always felt JS was being unhelpful; be it getting the value of an object, be it the inheritance syntax (I have no issues with the prototypal aspect, just the way you express it), lack of good ways to move through a list, the somewhat difficult to understand scoping of 'this'...
It's not that any one thing is especially broken, it's just that all added up I feel like it's not finished, and I'm not Getting Stuff Done as I do with Python.
Google Closure seems to go some of the way there, but I get the feeling that's probably just adding some syntactic sugar to make swallowing the bitterness a bit easier.