To be fair, one shouldn't bash Brendan, he had to build the initial JavaScript language in a week[1]. It's not his fault the language became the defacto web-language.
Yes, if there's one thing that Doug Crockford should have taught us all by now, it's that Brendan was actually pretty smart, and we were damn lucky to end up with Javascript compared to what could have been.
I don't know.... If it was really bad, it could have been replaced with something better. If it was really good it could be kept. Today we're stuck with something half bad/half good, we're keeping it and it is uncomfortable at times.
Add it to the deficiencies of html and css and web dev becomes a chore.
I found that whole part of the presentation to be a real turn off. All those guys (beards or not) deserve admiration. Any one who creates a language that's used by hundreds of thousands of developers probably did far more right than they did wrong.
I understand it was just a stupid joke but when your stupid joke insults a person who deserves praise you should probably reconsider the joke.
Oh, I'm absolutely not trying to bash Brendan. The fact that he managed to produce anything at all in the short time he had is profoundly impressive on its own, and the core of genius that exists in between the Bad Parts is worthy of all kinds of admiration. Also, the way I understand it, he originally intended to make a Scheme implementation for the browser - unsuccessfully, alas, but it still suggests he may well be the most amazing man in web history, even if he does know how to use a razor.
The point of the JS bashing in the slides is that the Bad Parts do exist, and CoffeeScript does a great job of routing around them, as does Strict Mode.
[1]http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...