Language for the webdev
There are always holy wars around Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java and C#. We have enormous freedom on the server side comparing to a quirky browser environment. Why don’t we use Javascript on the server?
2-3 years ago server-side JS wouldn’t give us anything what wasn’t already available in other environments. But today we build rich applications with tons of code in javascript. Don’t we have some code to be shared with the server?
jQuery, prototype.js and MooTools may be used as a template engines, much flexible than <%%> and <??> tags, but also nicer and more lightweight than XSLT.
Selectors and transformations could be used both on the server side (to produce statically generated pages) and client side (for partial ajax updates).
Raw data interchange becomes easier. Also, you have common testing toolkit.
Recent JS implementations outperform Ruby, Python and Perl. Mostly, due to JS simplicity (no method_missing(), no classes and metaclasses etc.), but also because of enormous experience comparing with legacy server-side technologies. While Ruby, Python and Perl are used by X developers each, JS is used by (3*X + Y) developers plus hundreds of millions of mere mortals all around the world.
I believe, there’ll be web-server written for some open source JS engine very soon (Apache and Java don’t count).