I've just got back into the Javascript world after several years of Python programming. My gut feeling is that we will end up with APIs in some language, and universal [0] Javascript apps that can render both client and server side. I don't think there's a place for non-Javascript server-side templating in the long run. JS (as a language, forgetting about the frameworks) has really come a long way in the last few years, to the point where I don't think you'll be able to justify having two different HTML rendering systems for much longer.
[0] aka isomorphic, but universal seems to be the new (IMO better, less overloaded) term for that
I don't know, I put Vanilla, jQuery, Angular, React and Vue in production. I used gulp and webpack and manual setup. I used node and static js.
In in end, nothing is well integrated.
You would think the whole bloody "one language to rule them all" concept would make the JS stack the most integrated one of all.
Well to my surprise, far from it. It's a mess of hundred of moving unstable badly documented always changing components that your job is to make work together.
There is no django of the JS word. None.
And because of that, most JS projects I worked on were disposable projects, prototype in production.
Now there is no meteor in the Python word neither. But professionally, I need something solid, not an ongoing experiment.
You can make fantastic stuff with JS, but only because the platform is fantastic. The web is genius. The JS ecosystem is terrible.
But wish, I really wish the JS community would pick on the seriousness of other communities and the python one would take more risks and innovations like the JS one.
Oh, yeah, it's a mess right now. Debugging especially sucks. I'm hoping that given 5 more years of work on server-side JS we'll get to something that's not miserable, and that transpiling will be a thing of the past
After learn and forget a few js frameworks, see develop the "compile to javascript" fashion, javascript jumping to the server, the different flavours of MVC, "isomorphic programming", subsets of javascript that compile to whatever and etc..; my gut feeling is that it will never end.
If that is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
[0] aka isomorphic, but universal seems to be the new (IMO better, less overloaded) term for that