Javascript is wonderful for prototyping ideas, Ruby was very popular for this reason too a while ago. You can quickly make a client-rich web app in just the one language with lots of libraries and tooling (for better or worse) to aid you. Prototyping ideas is a very important trait.
Generally as a product idea matures and stability is required people may tend to refactor parts of systems into more "mature" languages; but not always.
There are plenty of stories of the likes of twitter, soundcloud etc taking this path.
Other reason I've seen a lot is performance against languages such as Java and C#.
I think it would be nice if performance wasn't talked about so simply :)
A lot of all this stuff is "it depends", performance has nuance. Node is not very good at CPU bound operations; I worked at a place where we re-wrote a service from node to Go for this reason. The performance increase was huge. But we never discounted the fact that Node's simplicity (and the availability of skilled engineers with it) meant we could create the service in the first place very quickly.
Java Web Developer with a passion for Spring and cloud computing. Know a thing or two about AWS. Trying to learn NodeJS lately with the help of TypeScript.
Sorry for the simplicity regarding performance, it was my intention to make a quick overview of the reasons I've seen to use Javascript and gather more opinions about it. One of the reasons was indeed performance, principally start time in serverless, which is something I've studied. True, in other use cases NodeJS may not be the best answer, I will probably find out which ones while I progress in the NodeJs world.
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Javascript is wonderful for prototyping ideas, Ruby was very popular for this reason too a while ago. You can quickly make a client-rich web app in just the one language with lots of libraries and tooling (for better or worse) to aid you. Prototyping ideas is a very important trait.
Generally as a product idea matures and stability is required people may tend to refactor parts of systems into more "mature" languages; but not always.
There are plenty of stories of the likes of twitter, soundcloud etc taking this path.
I think it would be nice if performance wasn't talked about so simply :)
A lot of all this stuff is "it depends", performance has nuance. Node is not very good at CPU bound operations; I worked at a place where we re-wrote a service from node to Go for this reason. The performance increase was huge. But we never discounted the fact that Node's simplicity (and the availability of skilled engineers with it) meant we could create the service in the first place very quickly.
Sorry for the simplicity regarding performance, it was my intention to make a quick overview of the reasons I've seen to use Javascript and gather more opinions about it. One of the reasons was indeed performance, principally start time in serverless, which is something I've studied. True, in other use cases NodeJS may not be the best answer, I will probably find out which ones while I progress in the NodeJs world.