[makeitdouble]

That's Java's story.

A single language to rule them all: on the server, on the client, in the browser, in appliances. It truly was everywhere at some point.

Then people massively wish for something better and move to dedicated languages.

Put another way, for most shops the productivity gains and of having single languages are far from incredible, to being negatives in the most typical settings.

[ifwinterco]

Java applets were never ubiquitous the same was JS is on the web though - there's literally a JS environment always available on every page unless the user explicitly disables it, which very few people do.

JS is here to stay as the main scripting language for the web which means there probably will be a place for node as a back end scripting language. A lot of back ends are relatively simple CRUD API stuff where using node is completely feasible and there are real benefits to being able to share type definitions etc across front end and back end

[makeitdouble]

> there are real benefits to being able to share type definitions etc across front end and back end

There are benefits, but cons as well. As you point out, if the backend is only straight proxying the DB, any language will do so you might as well use the same as the frontend.

I think very few companies running for a few years still have backends that simple. At some point you'll want to hide or abstract things from the frontend. Your backend will do more and more processing, more validation, it will handle more and more domain specific logic (tax/money, auditing, scheduling etc). It becomes more and more of a beast on its own and you won't stay stuck with a language which's only real benefit is partially sharing types with the frontend.

[lmm]

Java never ran well on the desktop or in the browser (arguably it never truly ran in the browser at all), and it was an extremely low-productivity language in general in that era.

There is a significant gain from running a single language everywhere. Not enough to completely overwhelm everything else - using two good languages will still beat one bad language - but all else being equal, using a single language will do a lot better.

[makeitdouble]

Yes, Java was never really good (I'd argue on any platform. Server side is fine, but not "really good" IMHO)

It made me think about the amount of work that went into JS to make it the powerhouse it is today.

Even in the browser, we're only able to do all these crazy things because of herculian efforts from Google, Apple and Firefox to optimize every corner and build runtimes that have basically the same complexity as the OS they run on, to the point we got Chrome OS as a side product.

From that POV, we could probably take any language, pour that much effort into it and make it a more than decently performing platform. Java could have been that, if we really wanted it hard enough. There just was no incentive to do so for any of the bigger players outside of Sun and Oracle.

> all else being equal, using a single language will do a lot better.

Yes, there will be specific cases where a dedicated server stack is more of a liability. I still haven't found many, tbh. In the most extreme cases, people will turn to platforms like Firebase, and throw money at the pb to completely abstract the server side.