Besides main languages features like prototype inheritance, anonymous function and closures, there is many little things that makes me like programming with JavaScript more than other popular languages, server or client side.

Most languages implements these basic features, but I like how JavaScript implement them more in terms of readability and flexibility.

First the ternary operations

variable = (condition)? true: false;

They are nice because JavaScript doesn't care much about white spaces and breaklines so I can use them even with long parameters:

variable = (condition)
            ? some.long.method.name()
	    : some.other.long.method.name();

But most of the time I'll opt for a simple conditional assignation, I find them easier to read than ternary operations

link = a.href || 'http://www.google.com';

Cute, but if a is undefined it will raise an error. That's when && becomes handful. I don't think it can totally replace the ternary syntax but it's handy in many cases.

link = a && a.href || 'http://www.google.com';


link = (a)? h.ref: 'http://www.google.com';

Object chaining is also a great feature that jQuery take advantage elegantly

$('.someclass')
    .find('a')
        .addClass('someclass')
        .end()
    .show();

I really like how you can play with functions and arguments. I find myself using apply quite often, it's useful to be able to specify the scope of function manually and be able to pass it variable length arguments

alert.apply(window, ['Hello world']);

Dealing with variable argument is quite easy too since they are stored in a predefined variable

function test() {
    alert(arguments[0]);
}

Things I miss (not all basic features):

• 'Something %s %s'.sprintf('like', 'this');
• socket with persistent connections support (If Flash does it why not JavaScript)
• multi threading (performances)
• native JSON encode/decode support

Yeah I was that bored ..