While true, there are some languages that are the wrong tool for every job. JS is one of them. I’ve dreamt of a future where web frontends switched to something sane but instead we got stuff like typescript which is like trying to erect steel beams in quicksand. For web frontends I can understand that historical reasons have lead to this but whoever came up with node thinking JS would be a great backend language has a lot of explaining to do.
I am also interested if anyone can tell me the exact time in our history when JavaScript turned from “Don’t you ever use that anywhere on your websites!” into “It’s basically every website”.
I happened to be a fullstack developer when the transition happened, so I saw it firsthand. I would say it predated V8 by a year or two. By the time V8 came out, I was already writing plenty of (simple) javascript for applications.
I would say it was more about plugged security holes and Ajax becoming more viable for real-world use. The “don’t ever use javascript” rule came from people disabling javascript because javascript was being used for malware. V8 was a part of that transition and growth, but at least in my memory not the shot that started it all.
There were developers (and books) pushing Rails+Ajax pretty hard in 2007, a full year before V8’s first release in September of 2008.
You’re right! I stand corrected and thank you for sharing. There were already big JS apps (notably, Gmail in 2004) before V8 came out. Yet, am I wrong to think Node.js started the JS obsession that lasted for a while?
I think that’s a hard question. Node definitely helped evolve it. The idea of isomorphism was slow-growing (and yes, originally pretty rocky), but foundational to what we now see as web development. But if I really had to describe the start of the “JS obsession” by my experience, it would be the AJAX explosion, which led to the advent of the “web-based app”. That very first moment of realization that yes, you can do anything on the web. It might be hard for a developer who started after that time, but functionality used to be relegated to windowed and console apps. In that world, you could imagine how useless javascript must have seemed - why do I need to write code to give “functionality” to what was basically seen as a remote pdf?
But then, I think there’s no surprise to the fact every big company under the sun has some critical contribution to server-side javascript. Back then, most of the dev world were using Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP for their web backends (Java, VB, and C# were used, but too damn hard to write in). At best, those languages were non-ideal but reasonably comparable to javascript. At worst, some of those languages (Perl, lookin at you) were worse than javascript at all the reasons people make fun of javascript now.
It took a while to kick Rails off the “next big thing” podium, but it was pretty quick that Node was showing offerings that were just better than Perl-catalyst or early Python-Django. It’s funny, Rails was the one with fancy ways to ship javascript from server routes (what a shit show that tech was) back when Node was establishing new best practices on non-isomorphic web apps. I remember when Hapi first came out, backed by Walmart. I then went from being a node hobbiest to believing it was the future. 1 year later I was running a scrappy little node team and we had this little $10M+ telephony app (of all things).
While true, there are some languages that are the wrong tool for every job. JS is one of them. I’ve dreamt of a future where web frontends switched to something sane but instead we got stuff like typescript which is like trying to erect steel beams in quicksand. For web frontends I can understand that historical reasons have lead to this but whoever came up with node thinking JS would be a great backend language has a lot of explaining to do.
I am also interested if anyone can tell me the exact time in our history when JavaScript turned from “Don’t you ever use that anywhere on your websites!” into “It’s basically every website”.
It was when better sandboxing came out and the only valid complaints about javascript became invalid.
I was there. It was a good time.
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XMLHttpRequest
Probably when V8 came out. Also Node.js.
I happened to be a fullstack developer when the transition happened, so I saw it firsthand. I would say it predated V8 by a year or two. By the time V8 came out, I was already writing plenty of (simple) javascript for applications.
I would say it was more about plugged security holes and Ajax becoming more viable for real-world use. The “don’t ever use javascript” rule came from people disabling javascript because javascript was being used for malware. V8 was a part of that transition and growth, but at least in my memory not the shot that started it all.
There were developers (and books) pushing Rails+Ajax pretty hard in 2007, a full year before V8’s first release in September of 2008.
You’re right! I stand corrected and thank you for sharing. There were already big JS apps (notably, Gmail in 2004) before V8 came out. Yet, am I wrong to think Node.js started the JS obsession that lasted for a while?
I think that’s a hard question. Node definitely helped evolve it. The idea of isomorphism was slow-growing (and yes, originally pretty rocky), but foundational to what we now see as web development. But if I really had to describe the start of the “JS obsession” by my experience, it would be the AJAX explosion, which led to the advent of the “web-based app”. That very first moment of realization that yes, you can do anything on the web. It might be hard for a developer who started after that time, but functionality used to be relegated to windowed and console apps. In that world, you could imagine how useless javascript must have seemed - why do I need to write code to give “functionality” to what was basically seen as a remote pdf?
But then, I think there’s no surprise to the fact every big company under the sun has some critical contribution to server-side javascript. Back then, most of the dev world were using Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP for their web backends (Java, VB, and C# were used, but too damn hard to write in). At best, those languages were non-ideal but reasonably comparable to javascript. At worst, some of those languages (Perl, lookin at you) were worse than javascript at all the reasons people make fun of javascript now.
It took a while to kick Rails off the “next big thing” podium, but it was pretty quick that Node was showing offerings that were just better than Perl-catalyst or early Python-Django. It’s funny, Rails was the one with fancy ways to ship javascript from server routes (what a shit show that tech was) back when Node was establishing new best practices on non-isomorphic web apps. I remember when Hapi first came out, backed by Walmart. I then went from being a node hobbiest to believing it was the future. 1 year later I was running a scrappy little node team and we had this little $10M+ telephony app (of all things).
Thank you, that was an interesting read!
I’ve commented to my cow-orkers that “Typescript is the bag they put over Javascript’s face so you don’t have to look at it anymore.”