Software Engineering in 2017 : Personality cults and mostly a lack of appreciation for the history of CS.
Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
51–60 of 235 posts
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#52> That said, I think Node is not the best system to build a massive server web. I would definitely use Go for that. And honestly, that's basically the reason why I left Node. It was the realization that: oh, actually, this is not the best server side system ever. Really interesting. I can imagine others would refuse to give up on the thing they'd worked so hard on. But Dahl has the self-awareness to just step back an…
I think that happens fairly often. The first person to solve the problem learns a lot in the process. The people who come later don't see the problem, only the solution.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. It takes a lot to walk away from something and say you were wrong. But, sadly, part of the saga of nodejs could have been avoided by people looking at the history of computing. If you look at Go's concurrency model it was entirely mapped out in the 1970s in CSP. There wasn't really any need for go the 'single thread, non-blocking' route that nodejs took and evangelize it as nirvana. There was a ton of distribu…
I agree that we regularly fail to learn from history. However, it's worth recognizing that trying to learn from history can be incredibly challenging. There's a mountains of research to filter through. Sometimes you discover a relevant document, only to find out it's not readily available or that you have to pay an exorbitant amount of money for access. You might pay a lot of money for something that doesn't even end…
A good example - I have no idea why unix filesystems are like that, and after some idle googling I still don't know. Can't even figure out where to start to find the history of those decisions. Certainly am finding what kind of stuff goes where.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#54> That said, I think Node is not the best system to build a massive server web. I would definitely use Go for that. And honestly, that's basically the reason why I left Node. It was the realization that: oh, actually, this is not the best server side system ever. Really interesting. I can imagine others would refuse to give up on the thing they'd worked so hard on. But Dahl has the self-awareness to just step back an…
Agree. It takes a lot to walk away from something and say you were wrong. But, sadly, part of the saga of nodejs could have been avoided by people looking at the history of computing. If you look at Go's concurrency model it was entirely mapped out in the 1970s in CSP. There wasn't really any need for go the 'single thread, non-blocking' route that nodejs took and evangelize it as nirvana. There was a ton of distribu…
Lamport's paper was only the very beginning of distributed systems.
And CSP was invented by mathematicians for themselves, not for real life programming. As opposed to Erlang, which was invented for real life programming of telephony applications later in 1980s. But people keep ignoring history and think that CSP is suitable somehow, and not actor model. CSP is an even bigger mistake, don't try to make it look like it isn't. Learn from history.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#55Many are forgetting the initial reason node.js became popular. Consider the popular server-side landscape before node.js. It was dominated by Java, Python, etc. The primary way these ecosystems handle concurrency is OS-level threading. There was nothing else in the popular languages. Each language had some niche library that did non-blocking I/O (Twisted for Python, Netty for Java), but these all had a critical flaw,…
Was it?
I had the feeling before Node.js, everything was PHP.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#56Pretty cool how he took a very unusual career/personal route to become such an important figure in the programming world. Good reminder for a parent like me that getting your kids into a "top" school isn't a must to succeed.
I don't know about that. He went to some pretty good schools and got some pretty advanced degrees.
The guy is obviously at genius levels because he is a really advanced programmer even though he didn't really get involved with it much later in his life.
I've been programming on and off my whole life, and I can barely understand 1/5 of the concepts he's talking about.
Reminds me of that scene from Silicon Valley "He's a 10x, and I am a 1x".
That's just some "god" given talents right there.
But yes, I generally agree success should not be predicated on what school you went to.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#57It seems weird to me to have an interview with Ryan Dahl today, August 31st, without talking about the political struggle the Node Foundation has been going through over the past week. http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-governance-breakdown-node...
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#58A serious problem with Node was the callback pyramid of doom. This means deeply nested callbacks such that the indentation wanders steeply to the right. When you do loops or have exceptions programming got very confusing. In effect you have to do a continuation passing transform. It's not difficult but the results are utterly unreadable. For example a simple for loop could be transformed into recursive function becau…
This was easily foreseeable when he started on Node.js. The Twisted framework for Python had existed for years (decades?) before Node.js was created. Anyone familiar with programming in that style knew of the issues with "callback hell". I was the primary instigator of generators for Python. Part of my motivation was to do something like CSP (e.g. call-with-current-continuation, call/cc) without having to redo the wh…
Somehow I never experienced callback hell.
It always felt like every other code-nesting problem to me.
I mean, nobody talks about conditional hell, everyone acknowledges that you should flatten out your conditionals.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#59Many are forgetting the initial reason node.js became popular. Consider the popular server-side landscape before node.js. It was dominated by Java, Python, etc. The primary way these ecosystems handle concurrency is OS-level threading. There was nothing else in the popular languages. Each language had some niche library that did non-blocking I/O (Twisted for Python, Netty for Java), but these all had a critical flaw,…
Each language had some niche library that did
non-blocking I/O [...] Netty for Java)
More then Netty supported it. Netty, Jetty, Dropwizard, Grizzly, VERTX. Apache Tomcat supported non-blocking IO 5 years ago.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#60Even if Node is not the perfect server-server environment, you can go quite far just with knowing JS.