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Discussion on: Explain nodejs to me like Im five

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Courtland Allen • Edited

When someone wants to make their website interactive, there's only one language they can use: JavaScript. As a result, JavaScript has become such a popular language that virtually every programmer knows how to speak it.

Unfortunately, only one program knows how to understand JavaScript — browsers.

So even though we all know JavaScript, we can't use it for anything but interactive websites. If we want to write code for something that's not an interactive website, we have to use a different language. This is a lot of wasted potential.

Enter Node.js.

It's like we took the part of browsers that can understand JavaScript, ripped it out, and gave it as a gift to all programmers everywhere. Node.js is so small and flexible that we can use it anywhere we want. We can write JavaScript to create any type of program, not just interactive websites, and Node.js will be able to run it!