How do you use JavaScript?
<p>I'm not a professional programmer, but having a PhD in an engineering field, I've taught myself many programming languages over the years. The past few years I've been using primarily Ruby, and now I'm trying to learn JavaScript so I can do a bit of web programming.</p>

<p>I guess like a lot of people, I had a mostly negative impression of JavaScript going in, but as I'm studying the language (through the book JavaScript: The Good Parts by Crockford), I find that the functional part of the language is really neat. I dabbled in Haskell a few years ago, so I had some idea about functional programming.</p>

<p>I'm wondering how professional programmers tend to use the language. Do you stick to one paradigm when writing in JavaScript, or do you use it like a swiss army knife, and used different paradigms for different problems? Is there a "most popular" way to use it these days, or does it simply depend on the programmer, problem, company, etc.?</p>
