I have been teaching myself programming and web development for a little less than 2 years now using only online resources. I have been learning and tinkering with many languages and frameworks including asp.net, rails, php, and flask. Each language/framework taught me something new and showed me the fundementals in a novel way which helped me reinforce them. But recently, I was becoming frustrated because after all this study, I still had little to show for my effort as far as shipping things. So I decided I would focus on making some simple apps that consume apis.
I have found node and the express framework specifically to be the only tools so far that don't overwhelm me and allows me just hack things together without having to google too much. JavaScripts pleasantly simple syntax, and expresses minimalism let me focus on the important parts of web development like how things fit together on a high level. Eventually, I will go back to learning Ruby and Rails, but for now I am happy to actually be working on things instead of just studying.
So, from my perspective, I like server-side js more than PHP and I think it will continue to grow and improve.
I have found node and the express framework specifically to be the only tools so far that don't overwhelm me and allows me just hack things together without having to google too much. JavaScripts pleasantly simple syntax, and expresses minimalism let me focus on the important parts of web development like how things fit together on a high level. Eventually, I will go back to learning Ruby and Rails, but for now I am happy to actually be working on things instead of just studying.
So, from my perspective, I like server-side js more than PHP and I think it will continue to grow and improve.