JavaScript is a lynchpin of the popular AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology for Web development. During his keynote presentation, Eich reflected on JavaScript's beginnings as well as its future. The language was designed to get a lot of mileage out of a few ideas and has not always been such a hot topic, Eich said.

"It's been over ten years, hard to believe. It was the Rodney Dangerfield of languages," said Eich, CTO of Mozilla.

For the future, JavaScript will follow Python. "We're going to learn from Python. JavaScript is pretty close to Python," Eich said. Python 2.5 is being tracked, he said.

An attendee at the conference applauded the Python bent. "Python's a great language and seeing them pattern it after Python is really exciting," said Thabo Fletcher, a software engineer with Front Page, which provides online ad services.

Fletcher noted the impacts of Eich's JavaScript. "He's invented something that pushed Microsoft to do things," Fletcher said.