Before I even read the article, I was pretty sure that with a title like that there is going to be lots of debate from the CS people. They do raise some good points, but here's my 2 cents.
Besides a little bit of VB in highschool, JavaScript was my first language. I mainly learned through two books: "The Good Parts" which was a nice overview, and "Object-Oriented JavaScript" a really underrated book that covered every little piece of the language, even those weird parts like block scoping and falsy types.
Having never learned anything about classes or inheritance, prototypal inheritance was kinda hard to grasp, but I eventually found it pretty amazing. I think a loosely typed language is much better to learn on too. That way you can learn the big pieces of the language then later get into the little things like typing. That's just my experience, but I'm really glad JS was my first language.
Besides a little bit of VB in highschool, JavaScript was my first language. I mainly learned through two books: "The Good Parts" which was a nice overview, and "Object-Oriented JavaScript" a really underrated book that covered every little piece of the language, even those weird parts like block scoping and falsy types.
Having never learned anything about classes or inheritance, prototypal inheritance was kinda hard to grasp, but I eventually found it pretty amazing. I think a loosely typed language is much better to learn on too. That way you can learn the big pieces of the language then later get into the little things like typing. That's just my experience, but I'm really glad JS was my first language.