JavaScript: Your New Overlord

I do believe the primary virtue of JavaScript is that it has first-class functions with lexical scope, and that Scheme in the 1970s was an ancestor of JavaScript, but I just wanted to note that JavaScript was not the first language with Algol-like (non-Lisp-parenthesized) syntax with this language feature. (I'll admit that it's probably the first very popular language with this feature.)

All the variants of ML, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, always had first-class functions, without the Lisp syntax.

Perl took on lexical closures sometime in the early 1990s. I remember writing Perl as though it were Scheme. (And using goto in Perl gives tail call optimization.)

Also, in the early 1990s, I remember wondering whether Apple's Dylan language was going to take off (then Java came on the scene and Apple killed off Dylan). Dylan was basically Scheme with objects, and with an Algol-like syntax. Dylan had first-class functions. A world in which neither Java nor JavaScript made it big, but Dylan did, would have been interesting. Dylan, like Scheme, mandated tail call optimization as part of the language.