Douglas Crockford's been making this argument this year at conferences: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo36MrBfTk4&t=19m (linked to the `new` bit, but the whole thing's worth watching).

These stories get used an awful lot to justify dogma on everything from strict typing to Promises to whatever. I feel that's misguided - there will always be enough rope to hang oneself with in any language, and those errors should have been mitigated by diligent use of static code analysis (linting) and unit testing.

Paraphrasing the talk I just linked to, it's always better to have a language which will guide you away from writing the bug in the first place than to have to come back with a linter and fix it up.