This is relevant to my interests. As a configuration engineer who occasionally programs ("one-man devops team", a co-worker called me), I've looked at Javascript with disdain. A two-month stint as a full time Javascript programmer (in extjs) a while back didn't help that... the language felt awkward and unnecessarily crufty to me.
But now that I'm developing from scratch for my own startup, I'm finding myself back at Javascript. Node.js is actually solving problems for me as a server, and I'm plowing through a number of Javascript animation tools for data visualization problems (D3 is currently winning). And discovering CoffeeScript has made the whole process more pleasant, hiding the unaesthetic syntax issues and giving me best-of-breed features from elegant languages like Python, Ruby, and Haskell. List comprehensions in Javascript? Yes, please!
I'm not to the point where I can find charm in the icky parts yet, but I'm finding Javascript solves problems I can't solve elegantly any other way, and CoffeeScript goes a long way toward hiding the cruft.
But now that I'm developing from scratch for my own startup, I'm finding myself back at Javascript. Node.js is actually solving problems for me as a server, and I'm plowing through a number of Javascript animation tools for data visualization problems (D3 is currently winning). And discovering CoffeeScript has made the whole process more pleasant, hiding the unaesthetic syntax issues and giving me best-of-breed features from elegant languages like Python, Ruby, and Haskell. List comprehensions in Javascript? Yes, please!
I'm not to the point where I can find charm in the icky parts yet, but I'm finding Javascript solves problems I can't solve elegantly any other way, and CoffeeScript goes a long way toward hiding the cruft.