For better or worse JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language6 . If you have done any programming for the web, it is unavoidable. JavaScript, because of the sheer reach of the web, is the dream that "write once, run anywhere" Java had back in the 1990s.
Footnote 6 "[removed] Your New Overlord” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trurfqh_6fQ m
Around the "Ajax revolution" in 2005, JavaScript went from being a "toy" language to something people write real and significant programs with. Some of the notable firsts were Google Maps and Gmail but today there are a host of web applications from Twitter to Facebook to Github. Since the release of Google Chrome in late 2008, JavaScript performance has been improving at an incredibly fast rate due to heavy competition between browser vendors (i.e. Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Google). The performance of these modern JavaScript virtual machines are literally changing the types of applications we can build on the web . A compelling and frankly 7 mind-blowing example of this is jslinux , a PC emulator running in JavaScript 8 where you can load a Linux kernel, interact with the terminal session, and compile a C program all in your browser.
