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by hnlmorg 304 days ago
JavaScript has been a backend language long before the web was the dominant platform.

And one of the, admittedly many, reasons why web technologies like Electron and React Native exist is because it’s easier to find JavaScript developers vs Kotin, Qt or whatever.

So youre not wrong but you’re also downplaying the network effect that led to the web becoming dominant. And a part of that was because developers didn’t want to learn something new.
1 comments
MonkeyClub 304 days ago
> JavaScript has been a backend language long before the web was the dominant platform.

I don't think this holds.

JavaScript was created as a frontend language specifically for web browsers.

It wasn't until 2009 with the introduction of Node.js that JavaScript became a viable option for backend development.

The web was already the dominant platform by then.

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hnlmorg 304 days ago
Actually I would say that was the turning point when the web started to become the dominant platform. Not the conclusion.

Before then it was Flash and native apps. Before then, smart phones weren’t common (eg the iPhone was just over a year old at that point) and the common idiom was to write native apps for Windows Mobile.

IE was still the dominant browser too, Firefox and WebKit were only starting to take over but we are still a long way from IE being displaced.

Electron didn’t exist so desktop app were still native and thus Linux was still a second class citizen.

It took roughly another roughly 2015 before the web because the dominant platform. But by 2005 you could already see the times were changing. It just took ages for technology to catch up. The advent of v8 and thus node and Electron, for that transition to “complete”.

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dragonwriter 304 days ago
> It wasn't until 2009 with the introduction of Node.js that JavaScript became a viable option for backend development.

JavaScript was used for backend development since the late 1990s via the Rhino engine (the backends wouldn't be pure JS generally but a mix of JS and Java; Rhino was a JS engine for the JVM with Java interop as a key feature.)

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hnlmorg 303 days ago
Around that era, IIS also supported JS via ASP. Albeit typically people would write VBScript.
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