Why has Javascript been (mostly) only a browser-side technology for more than 10 years?

Posted by Gabriel Cuvillier on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Gabriel Cuvillier
Published on 2010-03-30T19:43:58Z Indexed on 2010/03/30 20:33 UTC
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JavaScript

Recently there is a lot of projects that pushes Javascript into other directions: as a general purpose scripting language (GLUEScript, Rhino), as an extension language (QTScript, Adobe Reader, OO Macros), Widgets (Yahoo Widgets, MS Gadgets, Dashboard), and even server-side JS & web frameworks (CommonJS, Helma, Phobos, V8cgi), which seems obvious since it is already a language widely used for web development.

But wait, everything is so new and nothing is really mature. However JS is around for almost 15 years, being as powerfull as any other scripting languages, being standardised by the ECMA, and being a mandatory technology for web development.

Why did it take so much time to gain acceptance into other domains than web browsers?

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