JavaScript is tremendously important to learn.

• All browsers have JavaScript interpreters built in. No other languages have this tremendous advantage, and it’s unlikely this will change soon.
• JavaScript is a pretty darn nice language once you get past the little annoyances. If you have a hard time swallowing the shortcomings, try CoffeeScript, it’s pretty!
• Functions as objects is extremely, extremely powerful. Programming JavaScript is like throwing around super-intelligent play-doh that can be re-molded mid-air.
• There is not one, but THREE ultra-fast JavaScript engines around (FireFox SpiderMonkey, Google V8 and Safari JavaScriptCore) and they are all fiercely competing to become faster and faster.
• node.js has created a tremendous amount of funky back-end frameworks for JavaScript. http://meteor.com is just insanely cool, if you haven’t tried it.
• http://codeacademy.com
• http://jsfiddle.net
• There are currently four hojillion kabillion different combinations of operating systems, devices and screen sizes around, and I see no indication of this fragmentation stopping. This in combination with browsers getting more and more powerful, and bandwidth getting cheaper and more reliable, more and more applications will be built as web apps instead of native.

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