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Muhammad Al-jefry
Muhammad Al-jefry

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JavaScript will not die, will NodeJS?

as you see programming evolving daily so if you want to be a great developer in software industry you should have a knowledge and awareness of what's new things in your path and trying to be more compatible with. And choosing the right tools for your self, business and team.

JavaScript is one of the most revolution in software industry especially on the web. there are a long stories around JavaScript and they will be longer.

In this post I will share my ideas about JavaScript and reasons of it’s live Also I will talk alot about JavaScript Run-Time environment such NodeJS and Deno. I will not dive deeply on tech and programming hierarchy this post will be as simple as possible

The history of JavaScript.

In June 1997 Netscape raised the JavaScript as a scripting language of ECMAScript specification. Over ECMAScript evolved with many and many editions shipped the best practices of writing front-end language and now it’s used in back-ends too. because of ECMAScript JavaScript will not die or it will live longer than anybody think.

I'm alive


Super helpers

After creating NodeJS, Many tools come such NPM,electron and Facebook Hermes.js. Those tools makes development on javascript much easier also increased the productivity of javascript developers. with nodejs javascript language runs everywhere

NodeJS is really big revolution and it’s helps JavaScript to be everywhere with high performance and here a link of performance comparison with python

JavaScript is everywhere it's on mobile, desktop, IoT, ML, and AI. You can build a great applications on mobile with react native, desktops with electron and react native and also ML while TensorFlow has a JavaScript version. In the other hand JavaScript is not doing all this independently it got help from another low level language to give it this Diversity and power. exactly C++, NodeJS built with C++ but it had many things goes in wrong way as Ryan Dahl, gives a talks about it and raising Deno.


Is NodeJS gonna die?

I don’t know, maybe. but it was the reason of being JavaScript everywhere and many tech using it on production and that's good enough reason to be alive for a couple of years. NodeJS was a great solution makes JavaScript stronger than ever before. And many Tech tried to run JavaScript in server-side even Netscape it self and all tries suddenly fails because the way they used and philosophy but Ryan Dahl win, with the philosophy of NodeJS. So why it should be die?

Short answer because of Deno. Nodejs built earlier and many new things goes after was not compatible with nodejs. NodeJS Design have many issues as Ryan Dahl and the solution was with Deno. Design issue is hard to fix and while Node.JS served with dozens of real projects it was hard to redesign a new NodeJS.

Here some deference between them:

Feature Deno NodeJS
Language Rust C++
Supported Language By default TypeScript + JavaScript JavaScript + TypeScript! need some headech config and some times fails 😩
Modules URLs node_modules "npm" => lead to Url 🤐 in web

Conclusion

Deno conception is better but it's still earlier to kill nodejs. the most good thing in Deno is Rust. Rust is really good language and as frontend developer it the right time for me to learn it to dive deeply on WA And Contribution in Deno Community. Deno run both JavaScript and TypeScript so it your choice. feel free to say no and share you thoughts.

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