but what is really scary is what a mess Javascript is in 2014 --- makes Perl look like BASIC. No need to obfuscate Javascript in 2014.
I've been working in software development for about 15 years now, and I've worked professionally with all the majors (C++ a bit, Java, PHP, Perl, VBScript which was awful, C# extensively which I like a lot). For the last few years I've been tasked with writing a very large client-facing web application, where my team was mostly responsible for the front-end (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) that communicates with a large RESTful service provided by another team. This included writing an API in JavaScript with documentation.
The first thing I did was set ground rules on how my team should program in JavaScript, the structure we would use, how we would use the functional language to maximize its abilities and have some class-like things (properties, inheritance, etc.) too. Now we have a full blown web-app with a JS front end with over 900 JavaScript files (when in debug) that are very nicely sorted and categorized, full class/inheritance structures, and many other things. We use Visual Studio 2012/2013 with a few custom JavaScript extensions, and along with Chrome's debugger, it is more than manageable. But we also don't need to target any old browsers. Nothing pre-HTML5.
I'm not saying JavaScript is the best language in the world or anything like that, it definitely has its problems, and it certainly doesn't fit as a choice in many situation. But programming for it these days is not the nightmare it once was (assuming you don't need legacy browser support), and in many cases, it's actually rather refreshing after 13 years of strictly typed non-functional languages, because you can do some interesting things.