In practice, in both my Arc and JS code, I use eval only when I absolutely have to... which is almost never. It's usually when I'm doing something incredibly hacky, like trying to eval macros at runtime...
Anyways, the traditional wisdom in JS is to avoid eval as much as possible. 99.99% of the time, eval is bad. It slows down your code, makes things like static analysis harder (or impossible), and it's usually completely unnecessary.
So, I don't see any practical problems with removing eval, but I do see some philosophical problems. eval has been a part of Lisp for so long, that it almost feels like a Lisp without eval isn't really a Lisp...
In any case, from a practical perspective, a lack of eval isn't a big deal at all. But I can see why some people might want eval (for non-practical reasons).
