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JavaScript Is Eating The World (dev.to)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In case you haven't heard the news, JavaScript and NodeJS are single handedly eating the world of software. NodeJS is an Open Source server-side JavaScript environment based on the V8 JS rendering engine found in Google Chrome. Once only thought of as a "hipster" framework, NodeJS is fastly becoming one of the most commonly used languages in building web applications and is beginning to find its way into the Enterprise. Netflix, Microsoft, PayPal, Uber, and IBM have adopted the popular "hipster" server-side JavaScript engine for use inside high traffic, high profile production projects. Java still powers the backend of Netflix, but all the stuff that the user sees comes from Node. In addition to Node, Netflix is also using ReactJS in their stack. PayPal too is moving away from Java and onto JavaScript and NodeJS for use in their web application platform. Uber has built its massive driver / rider matching system on Node.js Distributed Web Architecture. IBM has also embraced NodeJS as well. Even Microsoft has embraced NodeJS, offering direct integrations into their Azure Platform, releasing a wealth of tutorials targeted at Node and they have even announced plans to fork the project and build their own version of Node powered by their Edge Javascript engine instead of Chrome's V8.
Fad sniffers, that's why. I'm going into my get-off-my-lawn mode here, if you don't mind.
Tech companies and consultants profit off of change, and so encourage it, whether it's the right decision or not for a particular project. When technology stagnates (becomes stable), people figure everything out, and fixing and changing becomes routine and commoditized such that orgs no longer buy expensive new stuff and don't rent consultants for $100 an hour.
The vast majority of companies don't need "web scale", but many end up copying big-co stacks anyhow in fear of being left behind. They end up acquiring NFL-level equipment for little-league.
Sometimes these fads do actually either pay off or trigger similar good ideas elsewhere such that they do have a use in aggregate, but it's usually not good for a typical company to be the guinea-pig. Let some somebody else be the guinea-pig and benefit from THEIR lessons. You won't be hip, but you also won't be burned.
Table-ized A.I.
The only reason everyone uses JavaScript in the browser is that it is the only language supported by major browsers. If browsers supported Visual Basic instead, everyone would be using Visual Basic. There is no choice. The popularity of JavaScript under these circumstances is no measure of the quality of the language. There was no "test of time", since there was no competition.