I should have been more precise in my criticism.

The language itself is indeed "reasonable", but you can't separate the language from the infrastructure that's grown around it. My point is that, if you're going to go in and overhaul these things, why not go the whole nine and start pushing for client-side Python, Ruby, or any of the other languages that are traditionally used to develop the back-end applications serving data to the browser? The only reason developers use JS is that it's the only wheel in town for AJAXy web apps, and that there's a massive library of existing JS code out there to steal from. But are those good reasons to stay with it?

This looks like a good first step...