Atwood’s law
Atwood’s law states that any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript. It was formulated by Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, in a 2007 blog post.
The observation predates the rise of Node.js, but anticipated it. JavaScript began as a browser-only scripting language, yet its ubiquity as the one language every web client can run created pressure to extend its reach elsewhere — onto the server, into desktop apps via frameworks such as Electron, and into mobile apps via cross-platform toolkits. Each extension was driven less by JavaScript’s technical merits than by the leverage of reusing one language and one ecosystem of developers across the whole stack.
The law is often invoked as commentary on how a critical mass of adoption becomes self-reinforcing. A language does not need to be the best tool for a new domain to colonize it, only to be already familiar to enough developers and already present at one end of the system.