But it's actually not so bad if you just want some things done and for me I actually started to enjoy sporadic encounters with it. I switched from my own hacked soup to kohana and I found jquery and them alone made it much better.
And I think you're missing context a little, I think javascript is a wonderful language and you can do a lot of "real coding" with it. I guess you mean this stereotypical, boring, web development which I agree is extremely loathsome.