I agree that's a matter of opinions but I think that the OP has a point. JavaScript is easy to understand for everybody coming from C, Java or PHP even if its core is very different from those two languages. Haskell might be cleaner but it's difficult to get for people that used only procedural languages, which are most of the programmers working today (especially if the expected domain for PureScript is web programming, frontend or backend).
There is a functional language called Elixir which runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir has been designed to look like Ruby even if it's very different. That makes Ruby programmers (and maybe Python ones too) feel at ease in their first approaches with the language. When you realize how different the two languages really are you already grokked enough of Elixir to keep you going. There isn't that feeling of "oh my, I can't make it" one might have when looking at code like this http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs/src/Pugs/Eval.hs when knowing only about C/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby
So, my take is that if a language designer wants to create a functional language that will lure really many procedural programmers into it, s/he has to design something that looks like C or Java. PureScript is too much like Haskell (plus I hate indentation-sensitiveness, but that's almost only a subjective matter). Time will tell.
Javascript has enough implicit behavior and then some to make working with it a nightmare unless you remain extremely diligent with your coding practices. To a large extent, it's been around long enough for this to not be a major problem anymore, but is this an acceptable state of affairs for a language that dominates web programming? I'd expect most people to say "no".
I'd say the target audience for PureScript is probably not "everybody coming from C, Java or PHP", but people who appreciate stronger type systems, and possibly people with a Haskell background.
There are already several JavaScript flavors for the audience you mentioned.
JavaScript has some things in it that shouldn't be used but that's true with almost any language out there. There is no reason you can't write clean, easy to read and understand, code in JavaScript. I'm not sure why you're saying he may be misinformed; you can write really great code in JavaScript.
