The two key things for making a good /language/ like PHP is a core language, and a good standard library along with the ability to extend that. PHP has it’s core language, the extensive std built into that (though it’s debatable if building it in is a good pattern), and pecl and pear for extending it.
JavaScript is a great core language, but it is missing a good std and extensions onto that.

There actually is a project working on providing libraries though, jslibs. Soubok is focusing on low/med level libraries. The community there seams to agree on a few points though:
- Most libraries actually shouldn’t be stuck implemented in C. TraceMonkey is already fast enough that the tradeoff between doing something in C vs. JS is so little that if you can do it in JS it’s better to just do it there, it makes portability easier and also makes it easier for the JS programmers to improve it.
- and environments like mod_somejssystem for Apache aren’t the way to go. The community agrees that it shouldn’t be tied down to an environment like Apache (there are plenty of reasons to use another webserver, a company might already have ISS established, or someone may prefer using a lightweight server like nginx or lighttpd) so the community has been focused instead on FastCGI.

With that in mind the focus of jslibs is providing those low level layers like jsio (Sockets, File, Directory; It’s NSPR basically) which allow you to write the actual protocol stuff like a HTTP library, right in JavaScript. Since that’s the project’s focus I also started MonkeyScript (codename for now) to extend jslibs with JavaScript libraries and also provide a method (similar to ASDF for Lisp) for including libraries and another method (Like pear, asdf-install, clbuild, gems, rocks, etc…) for downloading new libraries.

jslibs: http://code.google.com/p/jslibs/
monkeyscript: http://monkeyscript.nadir-point.com/wiki/MonkeyScript

It seems like “they execute in Java land” is a bad thing the way you write it. Why?

Why do so many people use PHP even though most would admit that don’t like the language at all?

The API’s.

You can do almost anything with PHP. Files, databases, XML, image manipulation and much more.

If someone were to spend the time exposing into JavaScript (via v8 or trace monkey) all the capability PHP has, you would see that JavaScript program/module raise in popularity a lot.

Someone just needs to do it :)

There are several that have tried to do this, such as Jaxer and others, but they fall down in several places. Either they don’t expose enough (ie, just two or three API’s instead of like 10+) or they execute in Java land or their efforts are directed towards a hosted cloud (read paid) approach instead.

If someone came up with the framework for this, and made it easy for C programmers to create new API’s, I believe it could be a very popular open source project and in 3 years from now we could all be using that for our server side stuff instead of *ick* PHP.

No they are still using SpiderMonkey, but they are working on implementing Trace Monkey