Monday, 23rd February 2026
JavaScript is a programming language designed for scripts in the browser. A JS script is a text file (just like html and css) that the browser receives and executes. This is done by a part of the browser called the JavaScript engine.
When in 2008 Google released Chrome, it gained popularity very rapidly. One of the many reasons for that popularity is it's very fast JavaScript engine.
Chrome's underlying code (including it's JS engine) is open source. So a developer named Ryan Dahl basically copied the JS engine code and put it into a standalone program which he called NodeJS. NodeJS is in essence the JS engine from chrome but without all the browser stuff: no document (webpage), no user interface, etc. It just runs the code in a JS file.
What is node used for? Anything really that you can program. Desktop applications (for example discord, VsCode are programmed with JS), mobile apps (Progressive web apps, react native, etc), but most importantly servers.
You can write your own server code that connects your frontend (browser JS) to for example a database. This can be a massive benefit for developers as it does not force you to use different languages for the frontend (which needs JS) and backend (PHP, C#, Python, Java, etc). You can now use JS for everything which makes it easier for a developer to work on the full stack (frontend, backend, database, etc).
— Reddit, difference between nodejs and js