Microsoft and co ditched ES4.Let us be reminded that the only vendor pushing for it was Adobe.
So no it couldnt have happened with a better language,in fact it didnt,because whatever vendors say today,they dont want the web to be too powerfull.
Really? I don't see anything particularly wrong with Javascript... I mean, sure it's no PHP, but compared to travesties like Lua (1-based, seriously? What year is it again?) and bloated, convoluted semantic messes like Python and Ruby... well there aren't many choices left!
Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Opera (and obviously Apple) haven't exactly been jumping at the opportunity to deprecate Javascript in or out of the web. I mean hell, now we have technologies like Node and asm.js that make Javascript the fastest dynamic language in existence! People are even using it in embedded hardware now! So it can't be nearly as bad as people say.