In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet | Hacker News Reader

In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet

arstechnica.com

56 pointstaubek20 comments

Two oversights in this article:

- Failure to mention Netscape Enterprise Server (NodeJS is not responsible for expanding "the language's scope[…] far beyond the browser"—it was on the server from almost the very beginning; the author cites Brendan's 2011 blog post[1] which namechecks Rhino, but then leaves this out)

- Failure to mention JS running on the James Webb Space Telescope (Brendan's post also namechecks Nombas, but doesn't go into much detail about it; Brent Noorda covered this in an update to the Nombas section of his site[2] in 2022)

1. <https://brendaneich.com/2011/06/>

2. <https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm>

I think the first JavaScript book I bought, circa 1998(?) briefly mentioned server-side JavaScript, and then until Node came out, I never saw it again. It's fair to say Node took server-side JavaScript from an obscure curiosity to the behemoth it is now.

JS on the server seemed to me to be a solution looking for a problem. We already had plenty of arguably adequate server side languages. JS was the weird language you were forced to code in for the browser so why on earth would you want to use it elsewhere? Well I suppose the answer was "because there's a zillion people who know how to use it". But that wasn't true until it was.

No, the answer was that Node.js will run circles around Apache, because Apache was built before async was discovered[0]...

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg

It’s good to know the differences between libuv based event loops, threads, and processes. I think your comment simplifies that too much.