It's about interviewing Frontend _Web_ Developers. I don't think someone who cannot write JavaScript can call himself a Frontend Web Developer.

I guess front end designer then? Given that a complete javascript knowledge is encyclopedic, I'd say that you have to allow for a very wide gamut of experience for this.

What about the front end web developers who can't seem to create original designs, they fight the design and artwork part as much as a layout designer fights with javascript.

This isn't so cut and dry. Plus with the javascript libraries you can get quite far without writing your own js.

What about coffeescript, or clojurescript, or any of the hundreds of other languages compiling to javascript and targeting the browser?

If you don't know JavaScript, you're really handicapped using any form of higher-level language wrapper. Coffeescript is syntax sugar. Run into problems or library incompatibility with other components and you don't know JavaScript...well...

BTW, for the record, I've never actually known a coffeescript dev who didn't know JavaScript, too, though.

What happens when there's a problem at the interface between your favorite compiles-to-javascript language and javascript? If you don't know javascript, how are you going to debug and/or fix that? I've never used coffeescript or clojurescript, so maybe they're so thin that this never happens?

It would be pretty unusual for a CoffeeScript developer to not know JavaScript as well.

Never mentions 'Web' in the title.

That is exactly why my parent and I are correcting the title based on the content.