Grammatical similarities

One of the reasons that developers enjoy working with Node.js is that it's syntactically virtually identical to frontend JavaScript.

Let's take a look at some of the code we've already written.

Here is an example of JavaScript code:

document.getElementById('submit').onclick = event => {
  event.preventDefault()
  fetch('/data')
    .then(res => res.text())
    .then(response => alert(response))
    .catch(err => console.error(err))
}

Now, let's take a look at some Node.js code that does something completely different, but with similar grammar, with dot notation, curly braces, and such. Here is an example of this:

const http = require('http')

http.createServer((request, response) => {
  response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'})
  response.end('Hello World!')
}).listen(8080)

At first glance, these two code snippets may not look all that similar, so let's take...