A thoughtful piece by David Arno on the status of JavaScript in the landscape of languages (he takes a dim view of JavaScript).  Having never liked JavaScript myself, I am appreciative of someone more versed in the subject highlighting the shortcomings in language-design terms.  

http://www.davidarno.org/2010/05/18/why-javascript-is-a-toy-language/

Excerpt: For me this quote from [Doug Crockford] summed it all up: “JavaScript became the world’s biggest programming language completely independent of its merits.”

Scott Rehorn made a good point today, saying that it’s a shame browsers picked on an actual dialect to make the standard, rather than supporting some kind of CLI (Common Language Interface) mechanism with the ability to easily (and in an extensible manner) support different language dialects that play in to the CLI.