Advatage/disadvantge
Almost same syntax as C C++ but has way too much DWIM built in; I have seen far to many Javascript programs missing simicolons that still ran.
The language will turn your arrays into objects on a moments notice causeing hard to debug errors (at least at first) and has hard to find different gottchas from one browser to another. What it will teach very well is that life is unfair and that you need to take notes.