Steve Champeon has written the first of a series of articles on the history of JavaScript:

Disdain for a language that apparently required no skill to use, lacked an IDE and a reliable cross-platform debugger, and could only be tested in the context of the actual browser in which the page will be viewed, combined with a few highly publicized security flaws and several books aimed at non-programmers, caused many to write off JavaScript as a "simple" language for beginners and overshadowed its amazing potential.