You can use functional style programming with JavaScript, because JavaScript has functional programming language elements. There are first-class functions, and you can also have immutability, tail-end recursion etc. if you know what you're doing.

Node.js doesn't claim to be innovative. It allows you to do event-driven io that's been possible with other technologies since forever, but it just makes it harder to unintentionally use blocking io. Node.js can also appeal to people who would like to have the same technology in back-end as in front-end.

The Chrome V8 engine and Firefox's JavaScript engine since version 10 are reasonably fast and stand up to other languages well in benchmarks, and you can notice that they perform well in practice.

jQuery's real aim isn't to make JavaScript "less painful to use", but to make DOM usable. DOM is not part of JavaScript, but it's a large part of why JavaScript has a bad rep, since the DOM API really is painful to use.

There's no reason why the trend of JavaScript's reputation improving would stop in the future. The technologies built with JavaScript are maturing, and the understanding of the language keeps improving. JavaScript's reputation has been hurt by its popularity, since there are just so many JavaScript users that are unskilled or unwilling to learn. People just see that it's not classical OO and think it's bad, or they look at poor quality JavaScript code and think that there's no other kind.

JavaScript has progressed since the time it was mainly used for window.open(), but none of you critics disparaging it seem to have actually gone and made viable alternatives to JavaScript in browsers, or made viable alternatives to the web as a rich, barrierless application platform. It just seems like for some reason you'd like to keep things stagnant as they were. Perhaps it's because you're threatened by the idea that you've been misjudging JavaScript. In any event, JavaScript is here to stay, it'll keep improving, and your opinion will be increasingly marginal.

This is the etymological fallacy: confusing the etymology of a word (where the word came from) with its meaning. "Pwn" is derived from "own" but has a different meaning.

You think non-violent drug users are not jailed in the USA? You are a moron who projects his ideas of how it should work onto reality. USA is the leader in jailing such people. California, for instance, made it a minor offence only last year.

The same PDF can bee seen converted into HTML here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.pdf-archive.com%2F2011%2F03%2F13%2Fegyptofficers-rev-840%2Fegyptofficers-rev-840.pdf

Having it in HTML makes it easier open the links.

I think this is just being uncharitable.

Actually Assange had about 20 times more votes (382k) than Zuckerberg (just 18k).

Yes I know it's Idle...but still...

Was it Idle when you posted this? It's in the News category now.

Which does make me wonder about the "financial interest" angle mentioned in the Vanity Fair piece... are any of these media outlets paying for access to the current set of leaked documents?

Meh, some "exclusivity" they must be paying for then, since there's so many of them.

the case with Hans Reiser was different, and he was believed to be innocent by many /. readers even though prima facie he looked guilty. Assange, on the other hand, prima facie looks not guilty. if he turns out to indeed be guilty, it will both be strange with regard to what's currently known and depend on some hitherto unknown facts.