Love it or hate it, Javascript:

* Is the language having the most important performance gains lately.

* Growing support from both corporate (Yahoo, Apple, Google) and free software (Mozilla) camps.

* Gains market with HTML 5 (just the canvas element alone makes a huge difference for JS based software.)

* Better frameworks for both UI and client-server software.

It's funny how things turn.

Yeah, it's strange how only 2 years ago or so, both ruby and javascript scored rock bottom on Alioth Shootout, with javascript scoring 4 times slower than ruby, and ruby 3 times slower than python. Two years later and there's 7 interpreters for ruby and 4 for javascript.

There's something to be said for trying to make an expressive language and worrying about how to make it efficient later. Only working with stuff you know you can do efficiently can lead to getting stuck in local maxima.

> ... rock bottom on Alioth Shootout ... Two years later ...

Are they still rock bottom?

Javascript is a bit of an enigma. Usually, bad languages are made better (or at least tolerable) by the existence of good libraries (see C++, Perl). In the case of Javascript, it's a really elegant language made worse by being so often so dependent on the DOM and all of it's obscurities.

I admire Javascript because it covers so many paradigms, and yet is, at the core, very simple and straightforward. Much as Lisp is to lists, Javascript is to hashes. Also, there are some really interesting projects in early stages that are taking Javascript out of the browser. For example, when Google released the code for v8, Marc-André Cournoyer from the Ruby community slapped together a project that translated Ruby to JS and ran it through v8 (http://macournoyer.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/ruby-on-v8/).

Finally, I think it's worth noting that if you believe the "cloud" is the future, then Javascript is the de facto machine code of the "cloud"...