It's getting more significant. Keep in mind it's only been around for five years, and still has a very good adoption rate for a new technology.

How would you measure such a thing? NPM has more modules than any other language package manager, isn't that evidence that Node is at least somewhat popular?

I didn't say it's not popular. I'm just saying Node's popularity is not even near to Java or PHP. But I agree that Node's/io.js hype is much louder nowadays :)

Does it have to be the most popular runtime to counter the "no one really likes JavaScript, we just use it because we have to" claim? As the grandparent said, no one has to use Node, but people do; a lot of them.

I find this topic to be intellectually insulting. You know that JavaScript has its (tens of thousands of) fans. Why tell yourself otherwise? Is your hatred of it so overwhelming that you're not even ready to admit to yourself that others disagree with you?

"we have to" was not my phrase and it was about client side, not server side. And it's true. Somebody love JS, somebody not so much - nothing wrong with it. People are different and it's the key of evolution.

We're all responding to this statement.

> But JavaScript is a bad language, objectively. There's little debate on that subject.

Which is obviously false, there is lots of debate on the subject. So can we grow up and get past these blanket statements?

Node is definitely popular, but the fact that there are more modules than any other language is a bit misleading. Python, specifically, tends to only have one main/popular package that does something, whereas in other languages' cultures I've noticed that there are a few alternatives to choose from.

Node modules are really, really bad compared to maven or NuGet. Most of them comprise of less than 100 lines of codes.

This is NOT a bad thing, and it's one of the things I personally love most about NPM and the node community in general.

Yes, it is a bad thing. It means your upstream dependencies are snippets instead of products.