"The first person to create a pleasant end-to-end system for programming JavaScript web applications wins the next five years of web development, period."

That's the point which always got me going the first few times this language appeared on HN. A future developer with HTML5, video and audio, a library like sproutcore(note the recent news about Katz) in coffeescript matched up to a Sinatra-like base in CS running on node.js is going to be able to work like grease lightning. That world would be quite profitable in terms of the hosting opportunities (herokuish?), consulting and book deals. Much of it applies already to the node.js stuff I suppose. It's a pity Ruby or Python isn't in the browser as it would have the same multiplying effect (and add Python's vast libraries in other domains, at least on the server-side).