Re: broken by design?
The functional side of Javascript is exactly the thing that makes it powerful and perhaps my favourite part of the language, but functional programming is hard to grasp conceptually, hard to learn and - in my opinion at least - harder to write in a way that is easy for other developers to follow.
Most developers see a language that looks a bit java-like and assume they can write java ( or C or C# ) with it, which is understandable, and then desperately try and squidge the language into their expectations. That makes for cumbersome code that eventually gets the job done and is fairly easy to read.
Of course as you say most people using Javascript aren't programmers at all by training and just keep poking at the code and pasting from StackOverflow until it works.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
