It's not just the syntax that gets in the way with JavaScript -- it's the broken implementations and the short-sighted language definition (no direct system I/O, for example). It's a good language the same way Lance Armstrong would be a good athlete if he was was riding a circa 1980 banana seat bicycle designed for a ten year old girl in the Tour de France.

Anyhow -- yeah, I agree, regarding "anything that helps writing real functional code", as long as it doesn't also get in the way of writing real useful code. I'm not saying that writing real functional code necessarily makes the code less useful -- just that I've seen some people do some really boneheaded things with language design for the purpose of rigidly adhering to some kind of design aesthetic.

Thanks for the link about implementing amb in Perl, and the other commentary. I'll need to get significantly more well versed in things Lispy to really appreciate macros, I think, but one of the things I tend to look for in a programming language is duck typing or, alternatively, type inference. Thus, none of your suggestions really go amiss for me.