That's a load of crap, there's nothing portable about a JS environment that requires build xyz of browser pqr, plus the hardware requirements, bandwidth requirements, etc. Take any ONE of those away and you're hosed (e.g., try loading even a single web page from Amazon on 56k).
Every technology of the past 40 years has claimed "portability" as its mantra, and yet here we are still.
Sure, but the web is a unique portability story in the history of computing. Has any other platform been an open standard that ends up being table stakes for any new entrant? Think about it, if you try to make a computer without a web browser today, you'd be laughed out of the market.
Number of machines that can run code written in the language isn't really the best metric for realistic portability. Sure, your toaster might run C and not JS, but it isn't going on run your C anyway.
My browser isn't running my JavaScript, it's running yours. In fact, the capability to run my own code in my own browser is being slowly but systematically removed from the browser.
When I said "you" I meant "the developer" not "the user": the class of devices that run C and not JS is also a class of devices that generally don't run third party code. If you aren't a hardware manufacturer (or trying to sell middleware to one) the fact the embedded systems run binaries that were programmed in C isn't in any way relevant.
bash, make, and a POSIX suite probably run on many more platforms than nodejs does.
There is the caveat that too many people think they're writing portable shell scripts etc., but really they only work with GNU tools on Linux or MacOS. Then again, the same probably applies to many JS build scripts that end up relying on OS-specific behavior somewhere...
In my previous job, we had some bash scripts for a lot of things. It worked pretty well among Linux and Mac users in the team, but one day we had a new developer who was a windows user … We rewritten all those scripts in JavaScript using Grunt.
Maybe nowaday it's different thanks to Windows subsystem for Linux.
Wouldn't it be better for one developer to learn and adapt to the rest of the team? I don't get why all the rest had to adapt to this single person who didn't know shell.
There's a benefit to having multiple platforms on your development team if you are developing something for multiple platforms.
It's too often I see projects with "supports Linux, OSX, and Windows" only to find that none of the maintainers actually own a Mac and therefore it is filled with bugs and often requires the user to "find their own dependencies".
If we are talking days of time and not weeks, the benefits of making (and keeping) your whole system cross platform could pay off big time in the future when you or someone on your team wants to switch, or you just want to easily test on other platforms.
Exactly: Having a developer working on windows was a blessing since it allowed someone in the team to test on EI11 before we shipped to the product team, and it really improved our reactivity on this plateform. It wasn't our main target since our product was using webRtc(i.e. Firefox and Chrome), but it was supposed to fail gracefully on IE.
At least these days you can download VirtualBox images for free to test on IE11. But yeah, it's a luxury if there's a Windows developer that you can have fixing all the IE11 bugs ;).
There's plenty of other POSIX userlands for Windows before WSL (cygwin, Ming). There are also plenty of other cross platform programming environments before Grunt (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell, numerous lisps, etc).
JavaScript isn't unique. It's not even the best at what it does. It just has a monopoly in the browser so people latched on to it.
Portability.