node.js

How To Be A Hipster

(who writes IO-intensive web applications in JavaScript)

What is Javascript?

Javascript is a language designed for client-side scripting in the browser. It allows for rich UI interactions such as the presentation you see before you.

Where was it born?

It was developed by Brendan Eich, an employee at some company called Netscape, and released in 1995.

He wanted to make Scheme (a functional Lisp) for the browser, but then everyone was all, "Ooh, Java, this language is so awesome, let's rename LiveScript to JavaScript because Java is like mad fly and applets are the future of the web, yo".

So they gave it curly braces and named it JavaScript.

But on the server? That's madness!

With Google's V8 engine under the hood, it's pretty darn fast for a scripting language, and JavaScript's single threaded event-based model makes it work well for apps which handle many short bursts of input & output.

Also, you can write servers in it

So you can have (server-side) JavaScript serving up pages which contain copious amounts of (client-side) JavaScript which talk to (server-side) JavaScript through AJAX.

let's pick on php

I know it's easy, but I'm going to do it anyway.