JavaScript Is ambiguous these days. How much percentage of the JavaScript popularity is from the backend language Nodejs and how much of it from the client side(html, react, angular, etc)?
in the frontend world, it really is only Javascript, so I don't think we need a popularity contest there. and it's in use by practically all the websites in the world as a dynamic renderer.
but when comparing a language like Java, PHP, Node, Python, I really don't want to see the results of frontend Javascript skewing the results. otherwise, one would just assume Javascript is the most popular backend language, but that is not the case, as stated in the article.
article states that one of the rankings had Java as #1 and Javascript as #8. but on the other, JS was overwhelmingly #1 (because it combined both frontend and backend).
you need distinction because frontend and backend are like apples and oranges.