Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Anonymous Some of this is an accident of history. JavaScript initially gained traction in the context of client-side web programming, and so it was first associated mostly with adding user interface sugar to web pages and writing filthy hacks to deal with all the cross-browser differences. Remember that there was a long and dark period before libraries like jQuery came into wide use. A "real programmer" will be inclined to turn up her nose at such inelegant and (seemingly) superficial work. Indeed, until fairly recently our "real programmer" might have been turning up her nose at front-end programming in any language. All of that isn't exactly JavaScript's fault. But part of the measure of a programming language's value is how well it encourages the elegant expression of a model, process, or concept... and by this measure in my experience JavaScript is a disaster. In every single legacy web application code base I have inherited there is some kind of... - Meryn Stol