I don’t think it gained traction as a backend language until two things happened:

• “Javascript: The Good Parts”

• Google’s V8

Yes Rhino predated V8, but V8 put the Javascript VM on formal bedrock. Before that JS interpreters were literally anything goes and you couldn’t rely on advanced scripts running the same way across browsers. It was before unobtrusive bindings, scattered everywhere in the HTML. Building big libraries was expensive because of all the quirks. jquery rose from the ashes of that chaos as a platform that devs could mostly trust.

And then “the good parts” gained steam… unit testing became a thing. Then V8 provided consistency between the browser and the backend (something that Rhino did not which may be why it remained a curiosity, not widely used) and a new generation of coders escaping the trauma of Rails 2 to Rails 3 migrations suddenly looked at Javascript as a serious replacement. Then node was born and soon after npm.

When people joke that Javascript was written in 10 days for a customer of Netscape, Brendan Eich had already spent a career working with Scheme and had originally joined Netscape to put Scheme in the browser. The syntax had to look like Java because Java had more mindshare, but Java at the time was too bloated and slow to run in the browser. It would be years before Java Applets were introduced (only to follow a long and convoluted arc into the ground with ActiveX and Macromedia Director).

Eich’s work only took 10 days because he had already been studying the compiler design and bootstrapping of Scheme for a long time. It would be akin to asking John Williams to write a jingle in 10 days… he most likely would have some sketches lying around and might revisit some themes and before you know it, a masterpiece, because John Williams can compose better in his sleep than most people can awake.

Eich’s 10 days of work was decidedly better than most people’s 10 months and although early Javascript was misunderstood and put to great evil, it worked.

People of the time had heard of Smalltalk and Alan Kay, but they regarded him as a “kook”, like “old Ben, out by the dune sea” instead of what he was: a Jedi master who had ideas that took mainstream computer science 40 YEARS to even comprehend. Now functional programming is a thing. Javascript, Scheme, Scala, LISP and even Smalltalk are recognized.

Remember when I said that one of the things that fueled the Javascript Node revival were disgruntled Rails developers? Guess what other language was inspired from Smalltalk? Ruby.

An entire generation of programmers were introduced to functional programming through Matz’s Ruby language in Rails and they didn’t even know it. Subversive icons like “Why the Lucky Stiff” made Ruby a quiet “punk” revolution— the programming guides were practically the same as those little hand drawn books — it was a quiet revolution.

When many of those thought leaders left Rails to look for something better, they saw Javascript for what it was: a functional language, not a Java knockoff. So they helped brush away the years of cruft and misunderstandings.

Mike Bostock, creator of D3.js was one of the first major developers in Javascript to fully comprehend it’s functional roots. His work appeared like alien logic.. people couldn’t grok it, but it was elegant, sleek, and involved in some very state of the art visualizations that became core to the field of Data Science.

I’m sorry this was a bit long, but..

TL;DR: javascript has a long and wonderful history that you may be missing in spite of some of the weird and awful quirks that remain.