'Most modern' ecosystem? That's likely, though it's honestly got the same things as every other programming ecosystem. I think the Perl ecosystem might be the most 'complete' programming ecosystem that exists today, in terms of implementing modern aspects of a programming ecosystem.
'Most stable' ecosystem? How do you figure that? It's only been around a short while in its current form. Other languages have had their current ecosystems hanging around for decades.
'Most evolved' ecosystem? Technically a single server-side javascript have existed since 1994, but other than JScript on ASP and Lotus Notes xPages (lol), nobody really used it again for non-frontend work until Node came around in 2009. AFAIK, jQuery was really the beginning of the 'modern' Javascript age back in 2006, and has slowly been adopting the practices of other programming ecosystems since. I would wager V8 was the biggest boost to JS development in the past 10 years, as it finally stopped being the slowest interpreted/scripting language in the world. Is there even a CPAN equivalent for JavaScript yet? It seems they've only implemented an equivalent of PAUSE or PPM.
Anyway, it's obviously getting better, but it's still pretty young.
I'm not as familiar with CPAN, but how is NPM significantly different?
As someone who used JS server-side from Netscape Livewire, to ASP JScript and even via Synchronet, and other JS runtimes... I've always appreciated the core language. Long before "The Good Parts" because Crockford only got a lot of coverage for what I already knew. Same goes for some recent adjustments regarding Object.create (and even inheritance chains in general).
JS at it's core is a decent language. ES5/ES6 enhancements make it very usable. Currently developing against Node 0.11.x --harmony, with a an es6ify for browser support. Given Node's very good async i/o interfaces, I've written a lot of bridges the past few years between systems that have trouble communicating directly.
Namely SOAP providers are a pain to consume in general a lot of the time. Not a problem to create a JSON endpoint in node that runs it fine. Need to process a huge XML or CSV file... Node is actually pretty nice... and can generally ship the final data where you need it.
Node is imho the ultimate service middle-ware... And to me, this extends to being the servers/services that web applications talk to... relaying to other backend systems/databases.
'Most stable' in the sense that both NPM and Bower are quite reliable.
'That's likely, though it's honestly got the same things as every other programming ecosystem'
I disagree on this point because dependency systems like Gems (for Ruby) and PIP (for Python) are miles behind NPM and Bower.
I'm also not aware of popular task runners on other programming languages in the same way Grunt or Gulp are.
Perl isn't a language I know well so I can't argue on that.
By 'Most evolved' I didn't mean Node.js but really the NPM / Bower module ecosystem. You rarely if ever have to write something from scratch due tu a lack of plugins.
I agree with you thought that thanks to V8, JavaScript has a performance level that is close to compiled, lower level code.
'Most stable' ecosystem? How do you figure that? It's only been around a short while in its current form. Other languages have had their current ecosystems hanging around for decades.
'Most evolved' ecosystem? Technically a single server-side javascript have existed since 1994, but other than JScript on ASP and Lotus Notes xPages (lol), nobody really used it again for non-frontend work until Node came around in 2009. AFAIK, jQuery was really the beginning of the 'modern' Javascript age back in 2006, and has slowly been adopting the practices of other programming ecosystems since. I would wager V8 was the biggest boost to JS development in the past 10 years, as it finally stopped being the slowest interpreted/scripting language in the world. Is there even a CPAN equivalent for JavaScript yet? It seems they've only implemented an equivalent of PAUSE or PPM.
Anyway, it's obviously getting better, but it's still pretty young.