I wouldn't doubt they could win if it came to issues in JS. The problems I've seen with JS are real. Like implicit semicolon insertion just seems like a really bad idea.
People who disparage JS aren't attacking Eich -- in fact I'd hope Eich would agree that semicolon insertion is a mistake in retrospect (but if not, I'd love to know why). But as users of a language we can react to inadequacies we see in the langauge, even if we couldn't necessarily design a better one from scratch.
With that said, I feel like a dynamic scripting language makes sense. As an application language, I'd personally prefer a statically typed language, but that's an argument that no one will win (from either side).
The problem with implicit semicolon insertion is that (1) the rules for it are too complicated and (2) it's called "semicolon insertion", which makes it sound stupid. Lots of other languages — FORTRAN, Ruby, Python, Tcl, BASIC, sh, LOGO — use line breaks to separate statements without the problems that come from JS's too-clever semicolon-insertion rules.
People who disparage JS aren't attacking Eich -- in fact I'd hope Eich would agree that semicolon insertion is a mistake in retrospect (but if not, I'd love to know why). But as users of a language we can react to inadequacies we see in the langauge, even if we couldn't necessarily design a better one from scratch.
With that said, I feel like a dynamic scripting language makes sense. As an application language, I'd personally prefer a statically typed language, but that's an argument that no one will win (from either side).