Your first-morning task is clear: the team’s setup check is moving from Python to JavaScript, and you’re the one porting it. Before you can port a single line, your machine needs something that runs JavaScript.
You’ve been here before with Python. You installed it, opened a terminal, and checked which version answered. In this lesson, you’ll do the same for JavaScript, starting with where JavaScript runs at all.
Pick a Place for JavaScript to Run
Python has one main program, CPython, which the python command starts. JavaScript has no single home like that. It runs in every web browser, and it also runs in several standalone runtimes, programs that run JavaScript outside a browser, such as Node.js, Deno, and Bun.
This course uses Node.js, usually called Node, because it’s the most common way to run JavaScript the way you run a Python script, from a terminal. It’s one choice, not the only one. The language is the same everywhere, but each runtime adds its own extras around it, and Node’s extras give your code the terminal and the file system.
Node gives you a node command that does for JavaScript what the python command does for Python. You hand it a script, and it runs it. Unlike python, though, node is named after the program rather than the language, because it’s one of many programs that run JavaScript.
