Up until Prototype I'd purposely stayed away from Javascript. All my app code was server side Perl. Prototype, for me, demonstrated the potential of JS and made

Up until Prototype I'd purposely stayed away from Javascript. All my app code was server side Perl. Prototype, for me, demonstrated the potential of JS and made me want to look further into it. I first used it to reduced the number of calls to my server by showing/hiding sections of a form and that made my apps way easier to use and much faster for the end user. It was a little clunky (for me) to implement but it worked with most of the web browsers at the time and that made those features available across platforms. That was huge for me. I replaced it with jQuery later on and still use jQuery. I have to credit Sam Stephenson with showing us (or at least me) the way towards full blown client side web apps. My latest version of that same app runs entirely in the user's web browser on or offline. Prototype was the first stepping stone I stood on to get here.