I thought Atwood's Law [1] was a joke, but this is seriously interesting. I remember when Java was just a fun little toy language for making web pages, and I'm still surprised every time someone mentions it as a serious number-crunching platform. (I've heard that the entire Nasdaq matching engine is a single-threaded Java application.) Is JavaScript going to end up the same way?

[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/