How JavaScript became popular—part 2

In 2009 you no longer needed a browser to run JavaScript.

In 2008, Google Chrome was released, with its blazing fast V8 JavaScript engine. V8 was free software. A year later, a software engineer took V8 and used it to create “Node.js”, a command-line JavaScript environment that ran without a browser. Here is an example of me executing the “node” command on my computer and then entering a JavaScript statement that prints “hello world”:

anthony@seska:~$ node
Welcome to Node.js v14.17.0.
Type ".help" for more information.
> console.log("hello world")
hello world
undefined
> 

This is very similar to doing the same thing in Python:

anthony@seska:~$ python3
Python 3.8.7 (default, Dec 23 2020, 12:32:20) 
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print("hello world")
hello world
>>> 

Now JavaScript was a language you could run everywhere—not just in the browser.

It’s amazing how things took off from there. But this is a story for the next time.