I was fortunate enough to be among a crowd of about 250 folks who gathered at the first JSConf.EU conference in Berlin in late 2009, when a relatively unknown-at-the-time speaker stood up and introduced himself as Ryan Dahl. Over the next hour, he proceeded to deliver a simple, no-frills talk with dry humor and little affect—not exactly the kind of talk you’d expect to receive a rousing audience response.
But we all jumped to our feet and gave him a standing ovation, for multiple minutes. Why? Dahl had just changed the game for all JavaScript developers, and we knew it. He officially launched Node.js to the world. Nothing in JS would ever be the same again.
In the eight or so years since, Node.js has skyrocketed to practical ubiquity, not only within the JavaScript world, but also far beyond. Node.js represents a powerful, respected, first-class, enterprise server-side platform for global-scale web applications. It sparked an explosion of interest in embedding JS in practically any computing or electronic device you can imagine, from robots to television sets to light bulbs.
The Node.js ecosystem is built around hundreds of thousands of published module packages in npm—the largest code repository ever for any programming language by more than 6 times. That statistic doesn’t include the countless privately installed packages comprising billions of lines of JavaScript.