Node.js marked an important change in what you can do with JavaScript. With Node.js you can use JavaScript to do just about anything you could do with a traditional general purpose programming language.
JavaScript Before Node.js
Before Node.js, JavaScript could only be used inside of web browsers. It was strictly for enhancing functionality inside of HTML web pages. Despite being the favorite way to add dynamic functionality to websites, JavaScript was still a relatively limited programming language.
What is a general purpose programming language?
For background knowledge, a general purpose programming language is more or less a programming language with wide support for a variety of platforms and use cases.
Python, for example, is a popular general purpose programming language you can use for data science, scripting, server-side programming, desktop programming, text processing, scientific analysis, and web application programming.
Node.js unlocked JavaScript from the web browser
With Node.js, JavaScript could finally run anywhere. Node.js was the first environment for JavaScript outside of the web browser. Suddenly JavaScript developers could use JavaScript on their desktops and their web servers.
Clever developers also figured out how to use Node.js to build tools that enabled you write web applications in JavaScript that can then be dynamically converted into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the web browser.
Node.js, however, also showed many of the limitations of JavaScript. There were many projects, like lodash, that used Node.js to fill in gaps in the core JavaScript programming language or to mimic features that other programming languages have. JavaScript was never meant to be used outside of the web browser, and it lacked features that languages like Python, PHP, C++, and Java possessed. These features included but were not limited to support for classes, object-oriented programming, and advanced data structures.
Node.js kicked off a new generation of growth and excitement in JavaScript that drove investment in developing new standards and core language features for JavaScript. Since Node.js launched, the core JavaScript language has had multiple major releases that added the features developers felt were missing.
JavaScript has become a much more well-rounded, capable language over time, and it has even started to influence other programming languages. Python, for example, borrowed from JavaScript’s async/await syntax when Python implemented its own asynchronous programming features.