JavaScript has lived through several incarnations. Many of the early uses have been hard to forgive as well as forget. Starting with AJAX and Dojo and moving up through JQuery, perceptions of the JavaScript language have been changing. I even heard rumours that it was a full-fledged real computer language. When I heard of server side Node JS I knew it was time to take a look. If you can run JavaScript outside of a browser you can probably avoid the DOM and maybe JavaScript won't seem so bad.