At the time, it seemed rather earth-shattering to be programming in the same language on both the front-end and the back-end without a browser plug-in or applet

At the time, it seemed rather earth-shattering to be programming in the same language on both the front-end and the back-end without a browser plug-in or applet. The possibilities such an arrangement opened up seemed potentially vast. Up until that point, it had been a basic assumption that the front-end and back-end had to be done in different languages if you wanted a site/app above a certain quality threshold (though Java applets and Silverlight (C#) had previously provided a way to run the same language on the front and back ends).