It's not technically inferior. I think historically many have confused not-like-java with technically inferior in Javascripts case. Combined with the fact that people who make client-side JS are less Real Developers (no true scotsman would code in js!).
JS is a dynamically typed functional language. Not unlike Scheme or Clojure. It's long history has made the standard library be a mix of programming styles, but I usually make heavy use of Ramda or Lodash and other functional wrappers to get a coherent interface nowadays.
What was a mistake was including `this` keyword though. Never use it, just like you would never do so in Scheme or Clojure. Carthago delenda est.
No upsides compared to what? Faster development time compared to Java, C-family languages is an upside. Faster VM (V8) than Ruby MRI, and just about every other dynamic scripting language, is also an upside. It's also an incredibly easy language to learn and write. Many of the weird inherent flaws went away with strict mode and ES5, ES2015 has helped make it much more elegant to read. Of course, you can always switch to a superior language like Elm that benefits from the same VM.
Oh, I did not mean to say that Javascript has no upsides whatsoever. It clearly does.
I meant to say that it has problems which have no upsides. By which I mean that it has certain weaknesses that contribute nothing to its good features and that could have been designed correctly without negatively impacting anything. They are just plain mistakes.
The unique problem you mention I think is vocal commenters that see "JavaScript" and immediately take a one-sided mentality against any tech stack that uses it.
Try to work with Javascript's arrays, it's a nightmare.
Fun fact:
let list = new Array(5);
list.forEach(() => { console.log("foo"); })
Will display nothing, if you want to properly initialize an array with a defined length, you have to do:
let list = Array.apply(null, Array(5)).map(function () {})
I make web games in Typescript, and I get all sorts of problems like this everytime I have to work with 2D arrays, problems that I don't get when I do games in C# with Unity. Unity's modified Javascript actually implements better arrays and recommends not using Javascript's native arrays: http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Array.html
You seem to be trying to fit a square peg into a star-shaped hole. Arrays in JS are actually misnamed, they are actually Lists. For game scripting you may want to make heavy use of Typed Arrays [1], which are more like the arrays you seem to be looking for.
for loops will yield better performance and the result you want to get. If you're trying to log 5 times you shouldn't be wasting memory with allocating an array or needlessly calling the forEach function or needlessly creating a callback. You're just wasting garbage collection and cpu time with this
If you're saying that "initialize an array with a defined length" should be "initialize an empty array of 5 values of undefined" then yeah, but you can also use:
let list = Array.from(Array(5));
as new Array(5) creates an array of length 5, but each is a "hole"
I know the syntax is similar to C# or other languages, but because it's slightly different doesn't mean it doesn't bring anything to the table. JS or TS != C# in a browser the syntax is similar...
JS is a dynamically typed functional language. Not unlike Scheme or Clojure. It's long history has made the standard library be a mix of programming styles, but I usually make heavy use of Ramda or Lodash and other functional wrappers to get a coherent interface nowadays.
What was a mistake was including `this` keyword though. Never use it, just like you would never do so in Scheme or Clojure. Carthago delenda est.