
Ask HN: What made JavaScript so popular? - wheresvic1
Compared to other programming languages and frameworks out there (JavaFX, golang, PHP, Ruby on Rails), what made JavaScript so popular?
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BFatts
It's the only language that runs in your web browser natively. It was designed
to be a simple scripting language to make web pages interactive. Written by
Brendan Eich, it was a quick project that should feel like C but be easier to
learn. It doesn't require you to learn about types and type safety which is a
topic that can be hard to grasp. It's functional and expressive, and those two
things make it fairly powerful. Finally, it has the backing of NodeJS which
runs on the server so, as was previously pointed out, means you can write code
for both the server and client in JavaScript so it's portable.

While it's debatable how easy JavaScript really is, most developers who bitch
about it love it. It has its flaws, like many other languages, but I'm still
surprised by the number of newer and better ways to do things in plain old
JavaScript.

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tdbgamer
It's mostly part of everyone's dream of using the same language for frontend
and backend code. When Node/NPM became popular and built up lots of useful
libraries and could be used for backend code, people started trying to use Js
everywhere. It helps that a lot of the ecosystem is based around
asynchronicity.

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collyw
Its the only language that runs in all browsers.

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detaro
that it works in the browser

