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The distance to convert math to python is so much shorter than math to C or math to javascript.

You need something like numpy to make working in javasctipt easier before there will be a proliferation of of ML in JS.

I really love JS for its distribution and some of the visualizations are amazing. But the low level, numerically stable, matrix math primitives are sorely lacking.

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You need the love of the data science community and they have settled on python, and when they really want to scale they use Java. I noticed Julia becoming very popular and the twitter guys use scala for their stuff.

I feel the people doing heavy work with graphics APIs and 3D work with robots too will push this back into the javascript language given some time.

I work with robots. The leading middleware is ROS. It is multi language, but does not support JS out the box (unlike LISP, Java, C++ and Python), though there is movement there http://brandonalexander.com/rosnodejs/

I can see JS useful for a UI to a robot, but I can't see it replacing Python for math, or C++ for speed, or LISP for planning systems.

That said, I can imagine node.js being a better async message router than the current C++ one.

ROS is glued together with XML-RPC, which I think was a mistake (why not JSON???)

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