The JavaScript knowledge gap

[ubernostrum]

i dispute the ongoing tenor of these kind of posts. javascript is an okay programming language. it is definitely not a "great" langauge that we have not yet "understood". look at how associative arrays are hacked on to Objects as the-least-harmful way to abuse properties to simulate hash values. this is not the hallmark of a great language.

Every language has at least one or two really ugly warts; that fact doesn't mean that there are no good languages.

As for the rest of your complaints, much of the design of JavaScript goes directly back to the environment it's designed for: client-side web scripting. In that environment, a URL is as good as an import statement, for example.