JavaScript is Eating the World

Virtually contentless.

The more time goes by the more I feel crazy for missing whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. Single threaded server??? I mean come on man, I understand you don't need parallelism for a lot of use cases but even if that fits your situation why javascript? It can't be that hard using a different language. I refuse to believe that.

What a depressing idea. I don't take JavaScript seriously at all.

Netflix uses Node.JS in the build process for their frontend. They also use React.JS inside of one of their TV applications, using a custom renderer (that isn't backed by HTML.) They are definitely heavy users of JS.

When people say they use Node for frontend, it generally means for things like Webpack or Gulp, not something running on the end user's computer.

I think a few aspects of the language contribute to this:

1. It is relatively easy to comprehend and pick up and play around with.

2. With the advent of node.js, and later electron, it is incredibly relevant whether you're developing web apps, servers, or now, even desktop apps.

3. Some of the newer features, such as arrow functions actually make writing javascript a lot of fun!

JS has come a long way. I do think there are negatives to its popularity but I think it has also probably done wonders in terms of lowering the barrier of entry to get into programming. It's honestly a great language to start out with these days imo. It's easy enough to learn the basics (excusing the quirks of the language that do remain), easy to practice it developing whatever project you want to work on, and, even though it has problems of its own, node is a solid and, again, easy to use (I think it might be becoming clear what aspect here I think is key to JS popularity) tooling system for the language.

It still has its detractors, but all in all I'd say JS is pretty great.

Now, does that mean so many companies should jump to using it right away? No, of course not. But you can see why they are tempted. Because JS code is typically easy to use, comprehend, and manage, and because of its ubiquity it makes sense to use it so that as the composition of a team shifts and changes it's fairly easy to pass work along or pick up where someone else left off.