Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well he does work for Google. We don't know if there is any pressure for him to be be a Govangelist .
TJ moved to Go too, and he doesn't work at Google.
Was I defending Node.js or something? Just stating the obvious.
Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
141–150 of 235 posts
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#142Many 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,…
Node.js brings callback hell to the serverside world of threads and we're supposed to be grateful? It's like you don't know the history of computing. Callback-based code was the original programming model in UNIX dating back decades! Threaded code came about because it's far easier to write it than callback-based code. The ONLY reason to do callback-based code is for performance reasons: for network-IO-heavy apps the…
V8 is not dirt slow. You may dismiss benchmarks where Node looks good as "invented" but there are countless real world examples of people moving from other languages to node and experiencing a huge speed increase.
I know of one startup that had a fortune 500 company sign up to their service and their dotnet APIs couldn't hold the load and the cost of scaling them wasn't sustainable. They rewrote the hardest hit APIs in node over a weekend and were shocked at the improvements. I also know another startup that had a similar experience, they moved off of Ruby to node and were shocked at the speed increase that they were getting. They couldn't be competitive with their competition with their old codebase.
Despite what I just said above speed isn't necessarily the most important factor. Infrastructure is cheap and developers are expensive. If I'm asked what the best programing language or platform is my answer is usually the language and platform that your team is most productive with. Only a few companies get successful enough that speed is the deciding factor in platform choice, if we say that productivity is the most important factor then the JS/Node combination is right up there as one of the more understood and productive systems.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#143Many 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,…
Errrrr what? No, node.js became popular because it allowed the legions of front end devs to overnight become full stack devs without learning anything but a new framework. To a lesser extent it also provided an alternative to PHP in the "get a simple crud app up and running with minimal knowledge" space, but I think that's far dwarfed by the ability of front end devs to start leveraging their skills on the backend.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#144Many 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.
Most things are still PHP thanks to Wordpress.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#145Many 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,…
IMO, the biggest reason Node.js got popular was because of JavaScript. You just need to learn one language to do full stack development. No need to deal with Python or Java or whatever. Being single-threaded is a side effect of using V8, which is mostly single-threaded. Since you only have one thread, you need IO to be non-blocking.
Agreed. And if it had just stayed at JS and Node, I wouldn't have minded. But then they had to go and inflict NPM on the world, and what should have been a tidy stack got idiotically messy.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In case you are just referring to the browser, callback hell is way more invasive in nodejs than in the browser.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#147Many 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.
They're both appealing to "web developers" of relatively less experience for similar reasons.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#148Many 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,…
Yup. Node.js isn't quite as old as you make it out to be, there were plenty of mature tech stacks out there with PHP/Perl, Ruby, C#, etc. Many of them perfectly fine to work with. Node.js came along with a very different conceptualization of scalability relative to other web-servers, and that was what drew people to it. Today we have things like varnish, nginx, fast-cgi, etc. as well as much faster servers which make…
Not to be a pedant, but all of the projects you mention in "today we have" pre-date Node and were commonly available.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#149Many 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,…
IMO, the biggest reason Node.js got popular was because of JavaScript. You just need to learn one language to do full stack development. No need to deal with Python or Java or whatever. Being single-threaded is a side effect of using V8, which is mostly single-threaded. Since you only have one thread, you need IO to be non-blocking.
I disagree because Rhino and Narwhal were already around. Libuv and the event/callback approach to IO (which is the part that's familiar to front-end devs) are the secret sauce to Node.js.
Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make a native app for every independent platform?
Windows, Linux, OSX - there just aren't that many platforms these days, it's perfectly do-able. If your core logic is in ANSI C (or equivalent) and you just need a GUI for each platform, even easier.
Don't forget iOS, Android and Windows Phone.