NodeJS

Quora Answer : Will NodeJS ever make backend languages like Python and Ruby irrelevant?

Mar 28, 2019

A few years ago, I thought it would take a significant chunk of web-server work away from Python and Ruby. Perhaps even become the dominant backend language, driving Python, Ruby and PHP towards extinction.

I'm not so sure of that today.

It seems that now the situation is becoming much more complex. With "web-servers" being fragmented into multiple "micro-services" each possibly written in a different language; depending on which provides the best framework or mindset for that particular service.

The overall system's shape will depend more on the scripts that orchestrate the containers that run these micro-services than on custom code in a framework like Rails or Django or node.js. And many services will be simple off-the-shelf components that hardly need custom programming at all. Just configuration in the Dockerfile or similar.

Programming a backend will be less about using frameworks with a programming language and more about orchestration scripts that locate your own micro-service into a pod containing off-the-shelf cache, db etc.

I'm guessing that Python and Ruby will still survive in this mix of micro-services. But you're also more likely to see other languages like Erlang, Scala, Go or Haskell enter the mix.