In this weekly roundup, we highlight what we believe to be the most thoughtful, helpful, and/or interesting discussion over the past week! Though w...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Because node made it easy for people to become package-famous.
When node came out, people with experience of developing scripts for browsers found there was an easy way to make back-end contributions, and that there were already a lot of ideas to steal.
Is there a package that does X, Y or Z but it's written in C? Python? Ruby? Then you copy it in node and become an instant package maintainer, which looks cool on your CV. You don't need to do any of the R&D.
To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this; it's fun to rewrite things in your favourite language and it's a great learning experience for everyone. It has also lead to a huge package repository (for better or worse).
But the incentive of a new goldrush combined with the familiarity of the language made Javascript what it is today.
Simple, the language is understandable from its syntax. I feel there is nothing complex when you're starting. There are no such fundamentals which it is proposing or are unique to the language. But soon you move on and want to do something complex you'd actually start needing the type system to efficiently work with it. And soon the comfort of the language hits you where you start making solutions and npm packages for yourself. Once you start doing everything in it and community making literally and building around NodeJs. You find yourself so deep into the language that it becomes your goto and you start searching solutions in that language.
I think it is relevant here to to point out that, imho, one of the main strengths and points of React (which is a large consumer of Javascript) is:
So in that sense, React at least, is half-javascript. React has been so effective, successful, popular, exactly because a large web application written in pure javascript is typically a nightmare to maintain. React uses a subset of javascript in well-contained small capsules.
And in that sense, perhaps everything is not javascript.
JavaScript didn't fully click in my smooth brain until ES6 so I agree with Alex that 2015 seems to be the turning point where it got real good. By now, vanilla js is amazing, you could do so many things easily without a single extra framework.
JavaScript = Frontend + Backend
Popularity = Developers have no issue with it + unlimited libraries.
In my experience good programmers never have an issue with JavaScript