There are certainly really bad languages (say, brainfuck). Once you admit that some languages are worse than others, you admit that there can be a hierachy. Of course, it's possible for the hierarchy to have a 256-way tie for first place.
I think the ideal would be closer to the asm.js side of things than the JS side.
It's nice that I can inspect the source of any page and read high-level code, but the tradeoffs aren't worth it anymore. I'd much rather have a generic (and FAST!) low-level language with lots of compilers from/to high-level languages.
We sort-of have that today, with languages that compile to JS, but the reality is that 90% of the time you're going to be writing JS, or at least dealing with it. And personally I'd like to avoid that as much as possible.
Just do systems development on narrow hardware platforms, and you won't have to deal with JS at all.
I don't mean to be snarky, but the reality is that JS is the common interface available to all browsers to access internals in a consistent API. In order for anything else to come of age it would take the cooperation of at least three major browser vendors along with a decade for older deprecated versions to disappear. It's not going to happen, get over it...
JS is a pretty nice language and with sourcemaps and tooling, there are a number of other languages that target it. Evolution is happening, and fighting it is like trying to pray to your devine entity to be saved from it all.
Self was bad because prototype based languages are not intuitive. This is why we get the endless years of people trying to explain why it's good or how to use it and endless "discoveries" and "frameworks" to leverage "new" tricks. JS is a mess because it's prototype based, to start. Same reason Pony is more progressive than Erlang (Prolog syntax?).
JS is a mess because it's prototype based, to start.
It's internals are prototype based. The user-visible layer is essentially class-based, but lacks syntactic support for both inheritance and composition.
