An Ode to Node

A poem about the technology that changed web programming forever.

Between the client and the server lay
a chasm wide, and on each side
the coders of each language stayed.
HTTP data was the way this these two sides played.
Perl, ColdFusion, PHP,
Ruby, Python, Go and C
split the server platform into principalities.
JavaScript had browsers as its one and true abode,
and from this language sprang the system that we know as Node.
Scalable, efficient, with asynchronous I/O,
Node took JavaScript to places no one thought it’d go.
A bridge across the chasm was by Node so swiftly spanned;
it raised an army to invade the server’s promise land.
This coding hoard did swift conceive a fleet of modern tools,
that those who built on lesser tech decried themselves as fools.
Angular and Ember,
Backbone, Express, React
rearranged the MVC and lined up to attack;
Isomorphic JavaScript has shown a better way
and its rise to dominance grows stronger day by day.
JavaScript the language still has all its early flaws,
and for this fact Node’s swift attack was dissed with loud guffaws.
But Douglas Crockford — bless this man — saw JS at its heart,
and wrote the book that showed us all to use the better part.
Now all one needs is just a glance at HTML5
to see that JavaScript today is very much alive.
The same thing cannot of the other server scripts be said,
For Perl and many of its kin are very nearly dead.
Coding for the web henceforth will never be the same —
and we who benefit from this know Node’s the one to blame.

Shoutouts

Meteor and Riot, along with Bower, jQuery, Grunt, Gulp, Yeoman, Karma, Mocha, Chai, Jasmine, and Sinon deserve to be mentioned, but I could not get them to rhyme with everything else while still preserving iambic meter. And last but not least, Hack Reactor, the tech accelerator that taught me JavaScript and web app development, training the elite commandos of JavaScript coders at the vanguard of unifying client and server side coding under one language.