When it comes to performance LuaJIT beats V8 hands down. Its really down to the "its everywhere", IMO.
And I'm not a big fan of that theory that JS is Lisp-like. The only thing thats particularly lispy about JS is the first class function and even then they are a bit fucked up because of the wonky function-local scoping rules and the "this" keyword.
Not really. He's just using that to note that JS is not really a Lispy language because of this. My choice for "why JS != Lisp" is how the Array functions return whatever you passed to them and not the array itself, so you can't write single-expression multi-modifications to an array. Unless you use the hellish Array.splice method. Which I'd argue is even worse.
And I'm not a big fan of that theory that JS is Lisp-like. The only thing thats particularly lispy about JS is the first class function and even then they are a bit fucked up because of the wonky function-local scoping rules and the "this" keyword.