Certainly eating all my inodes, anyway.
JavaScript is Eating the World
121–130 of 323 posts
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Node's success has everything to do with the environment itself in combination with the language. Let's be honest: it is nothing to do with either of those and purely a matter of fashion. In a couple of years at most there will be a new new thing and everything will revert to version 0.1, keeping everyone busy but making no actual progress. Gotta soak up those CPU cycles the hardware people are giving us somehow righ…
> Let's be honest: it is nothing to do with either of those and purely a matter of fashion. Let's be honest: if you need "fashion" or "idiocy" etc to explain a trend in tech, you don't have an explanation. Your explanation wouldn't even explain why it was Node+JS that got to be "in fashion" and not something else from the 20000 options.
Your explanation wouldn't even explain why it was Node+JS that got to be "in fashion" and not something else from the 20000 options
That's the point. There is no explanation, other than the same reason that bellbottoms are in again this year. Or out, I don't actually know.
We pretend like we're "engineers" or "scientists" but there's nothing objective about what we do...
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whatever would motivate people to use js for anything more than is strictly necessary. If that's the primary language you are good at, from coding frontend apps, then it's pretty nice to be able to switch to writing backend code without having to do a language context switch. Muscle memory along with your memory about library methods all just continue to flow. > It can't be that hard using a different language. If…
> If I'm better at one language than another, it is at least somewhat harder. Why struggle when you can flow? If you're better with screwdrivers, why struggle with a hammer? JavaScript has a painfully slow runtime. Writing servers requires attention to performance and reliability, which javascript is very poor at. If you want to make a toy service and don't care about any of this, go ahead and use your favourite lang…
>If you're better with screwdrivers, why struggle with a hammer?
Hammers and screwdrivers are not general purpose tools in the way that languages are.
For most things, most languages are just as fine.
It's not like JS is specialized in some very small niche by design -- like e.g. COBOL is.
>JavaScript has a painfully slow runtime.
I call BS. v8 is one of the fastest dynamic runtimes, at 2x of C or so for lots of tasks, and it totally obliterates Python, PHP, Ruby, and co in speed. And since some of the web's different properties are written in the latter 3, it's certainly not speed (which JS surpassed them far in) that's the issue.
>If you want to make a toy service and don't care about any of this, go ahead and use your favourite language. But when you want to make something incredibly fast and reliable (like nginx), you'll need to consider another technology.
Nobody writes "nginx" in JS.
They write the kind of APIs and apps and services that people also used to write in PHP, Python, Ruby, Go and whatever lang.
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#124What they don't say in this panegyric to node is that.. 1. The language (js) is absolutely horrific. 2. node is single threaded and non-blocking/async in I/O for some operations but when blocking requires libuv and gymnastics. 3. It moves too fast for stability. I've encountered huge memory leaks with node at various versions that are terrible to debug. 4. It is designed to the lowest possible specification for devel…
There are languages that I like better than JS. However, JS servers power trillions of dollars of business. People who grasp for reasons to hate on JS are a little like people who get into flame wars about video game franchise rivalries. It's symptomatic of deep unmet emotional needs in that person's life.
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just tell myself it's because the sales pitch is so appealing: learn, and use, one programming language on the front end and back end of your web site. I've never written anything on node.js, but that's the only argument that's ever given me pause.
It honestly doesn't give me pause, since the impedance mismatch between JavaScript and backend programming is so great. To me, the fact that Node has to add a library with custom semantics just to allow a basic 'open' on a file handle is a huge warning flag to me.
>To me, the fact that Node has to add a library with custom semantics just to allow a basic 'open' on a file handle is a huge warning flag to me
What do you mean? The fs module shipped with node is pretty much just a wrapper for libc. Hell, it even links to the open(2) manpage in the docs for usage information.
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#126What they don't say in this panegyric to node is that.. 1. The language (js) is absolutely horrific. 2. node is single threaded and non-blocking/async in I/O for some operations but when blocking requires libuv and gymnastics. 3. It moves too fast for stability. I've encountered huge memory leaks with node at various versions that are terrible to debug. 4. It is designed to the lowest possible specification for devel…
There are languages that I like better than JS. However, JS servers power trillions of dollars of business. People who grasp for reasons to hate on JS are a little like people who get into flame wars about video game franchise rivalries. It's symptomatic of deep unmet emotional needs in that person's life.
herp-derp.
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#127I feel like it's less Javascript that's eating the world and more Node and NPM. It seems as if it's impossible to publish a Javascript project without taking for granted that the developer has, or even wants , a package manager with dependencies, arbitrary toolchain and transpiler along with it. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur for not wanting my "build process" for javascript to be more complicated than including a script…
[deleted]
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#128Maybe. Callback / promise hell in a language that needs a book like "Javascript the good parts" is probably not eating the world. Yeah it is cool, npm package system is (was?) one of the easier ones to use. It is a good starter thing for someone who has only learn or done frontend development before. But I have not had a good experience with it on the backend.
Funny, a lot of Javascript projects on GIT start off with 'to install using npm, first download because it is easier to use...'.
I've got between 5 and 10 on my computer at least.
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Let's be honest: it is nothing to do with either of those and purely a matter of fashion. Let's be honest: if you need "fashion" or "idiocy" etc to explain a trend in tech, you don't have an explanation. Your explanation wouldn't even explain why it was Node+JS that got to be "in fashion" and not something else from the 20000 options.
Your explanation wouldn't even explain why it was Node+JS that got to be "in fashion" and not something else from the 20000 options That's the point. There is no explanation, other than the same reason that bellbottoms are in again this year. Or out, I don't actually know. We pretend like we're "engineers" or "scientists" but there's nothing objective about what we do...
>That's the point. There is no explanation, other than the same reason that bellbottoms are in again this year. Or out, I don't actually know.
You mean you can't come up with one. Because for me, which followed the scene for 20+ years, there is a perfect explanation.
Re: JavaScript is Eating the World
#130Maybe. Callback / promise hell in a language that needs a book like "Javascript the good parts" is probably not eating the world. Yeah it is cool, npm package system is (was?) one of the easier ones to use. It is a good starter thing for someone who has only learn or done frontend development before. But I have not had a good experience with it on the backend.
The road to software hell is paved with ease to use.