In the world of programming, there was a war waged long ago. Since the advent of the computer, scientists have been searching for the perfect programming language. One after the other, a new language was created to accommodate some purpose. And with that new language came a new era of technology, a bolstering community, a million libraries and open-source contributions, and — inevitably — a new limitation. Since the ancient days of assembly programming to the Java Applets and Flash Abominations (and I was a Flash developer at one point…) that dominated the web for so long, we have seen languages come and go for no reason more than that their usefulness had worn out.

The world moved in a different direction…

And that once shiny, new language was now old-hat, with developers dwindling and a new kid on the block starting to make some noise.

Now, JavaScript has been around for — literally — decades. So, you might be wondering, “Where is he going with this?” Well, this post isn’t really about “JavaScript.” Nor is it about the many languages that have risen and fallen before it. Nor is it about how JavaScript is “new and shiny.”

This post is about Node.

And we really need to start distinguishing that. Because Node is something else. It is not just a language. It is an ecosystem.

And that is what this post is about.

Well, not entirely. I’m not going to go into detail on the million and a half reasons the ecosystem is the most innovative facilitator of open-source collaboration the world has ever seen. No, that’s a topic for another day. For now, I’m just going illustrate how Node has already won the age-old war for the perfect language by traversing five key territories of modern-era programming: