the inventor of RoR even said he hates too much code...well the dude that writes Joel on Software has said too much abstraction and you lose the whole purpose of software development and in some cases lose performance.

>It seems too loose and wild in terms of syntax.

the frameworks, especially jquery, do simplify it a bit. And with the new way or processing js coming out in future browsers (forget what it's called but basically it's 4x as fast due to caching of method calls) more and more apps are moving to that arena.

>I prefer the structure of java. I don't mind having to use
>more lines of code to get something done if it's for a good
>reason.

YES!!! It's object oriented and logical for a fucking reason. Stop making scripting languages into Java and just use fuckin Java.

>Also, I could do without the craziness of having to tune the
>script to handle the shortcomings of different browsers.

Blame M$ for that.