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Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

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Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#151

Post by squeaky-clean »

gaius wrote: post #129
mahyarm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still 3 more platforms, which means 3 more developers, which leads to more $$$. Not everyone is VC backed with multi-millions.

But one of these "offline" apps has to work in Firefox, IE and Safari, so really, it's no different

As long as you stick to the APIs implemented in each browser, your code can be exactly identical. Realistically, you'll probably need to add some polyfills and edge case handling for IE, but it's much less than developing for different full-on platforms.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#152

Post by lsdafjklsd »

pdeuchler wrote: post #143
bit_logic wrote: post #49

Many 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.

There weren't really 'legions' of front end devs when node came out. People were just learning backbone.js and the idea of SPA's being viable was still forming. It was not easy to pick up if you were coming from something like rails, because it had no well documented complete framework solution. The people that were doing node in the early days were legit back end folks. I am now a front end developer, but I learned on rails and I remember having a hard time 'learning' node. It had no debugger (I was used to something like pry) and was generally a collection of 'low level' libraries.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#153

Post by thehardsphere »

dfabulich wrote: post #57

It 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...

What would he have to say about it? He stopped working on Node before there even was a Node Foundation.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#154

Post by cstrahan »

gshulegaard wrote: post #95
bit_logic wrote: post #49

Many 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,…

> Many 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. What? I am sorry but this is not true. Coroutines have been a concept for...well a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroutine…

It should also be noted that there's another statically typed language that provides multiplexed M:N threading (aka "green threads") and a programming style that looks synchronous while actually using asynchronous file and network IO behind the scenes (so all of the perf benefits of JavaScript without the awkward, nested callbacks and/or promises).

The language I'm referring to is none other than Haskell (which has been around in some form since 1990).

Here's the earliest paper I know of detailing the internals of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler's IO event handling system (from 2010, I believe): https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

And here's a more recent update: http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/hask03...

(Just in case of link-rot, the titles are respectively: "Scalable I/O Event Handling for GHC", "Mio: A High-Performance Multicore IO Manager for GHC")

Here's a short example:

  main = do
      putStrLn "Hello, what's your name?"
      name
Unfamiliar syntax aside, there's not a callback in sight -- it looks just like standard, imperative, synchronous code.

It drives me crazy when people tout Node's approach to concurrency as being ideal, as if callbacks are a necessity.

They're not.

Haskell, among other languages, is an existence proof that you can have lightweight threads and asynchronous IO without callback spaghetti. And I haven't even gone into Haskell's threaded parallelism, Software Transactional Memory, etc.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#155

Post by moosingin3space »

gaius wrote: post #129
mahyarm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still 3 more platforms, which means 3 more developers, which leads to more $$$. Not everyone is VC backed with multi-millions.

But one of these "offline" apps has to work in Firefox, IE and Safari, so really, it's no different

With the major exception that all evergreen browsers (most browsers in wide use today) quickly officially support new web standards, but Windows, OS X, and Linux are unlikely to ever officially support each others' native toolkits.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#156

Post by bdcravens »

topgunsarg wrote: post #135
gaius wrote: post #120

this new paradigm of model view controller New... in the 1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller#History It boggles the mind how little "web devs" know about the history of the field. No wonder they keep reinventing the wheel.

Maybe he's talking about when it got popular, not when it was literally invented...but I guess you can just be pedantic and miss the point.

I was seeing frameworks in ColdFusion referencing MVC back around 2001.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#157

Post by robinduckett »

vorpalhex wrote: post #122
robinduckett wrote: post #86

In this thread: people who don't use Node.js making wild presumptions about how it works. Callback hell? Been a few years since that's been a problem.

It depends :tm:. There are still a lot of codebases that are callback heavy. For one, callbacks are faster than promises in a lot of node versions by a very large margin. In other code bases, legacy rules still apply. Promises don't work well for some more complicated logical flows (though they're pretty damn perfect for the common ones) and async is still pretty new. Just because it's not a problem you deal with doe…

You can mitigate callback hell using classes, which are far quicker than promises and easier for humans to parse than callback chains.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#158

Post by esfandia »

gshulegaard wrote: post #95
bit_logic wrote: post #49

Many 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,…

> Many 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. What? I am sorry but this is not true. Coroutines have been a concept for...well a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroutine…

> Edit: Heck, NGINX was an asynchronous, event driven web engine released in 2004 and written in C:

In the interview, he mentions himself that Node was inspired by Nginx.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#159

Post by bdcravens »

dfabulich wrote: post #57

It 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...

If you think back to when he quit node, it seemed to when it was due to not being interested in anything not involving the technology.

Re: Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

#160

Post by Tobani »

cstrahan wrote: post #154
gshulegaard wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many 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. What? I am sorry but this is not true. Coroutines have been a concept for...well a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroutine…

It should also be noted that there's another statically typed language that provides multiplexed M:N threading (aka "green threads") and a programming style that looks synchronous while actually using asynchronous file and network IO behind the scenes (so all of the perf benefits of JavaScript without the awkward, nested callbacks and/or promises). The language I'm referring to is none other than Haskell (which has b…

Your still missing the point. It's not that it was possible to do so. It's that you could quickly write web services idomatically that did so by default. Your example shows a simple hello world and doesn't speak to the point being made. I am sure you can get a more relevant example going in Scotty, but it appears that it didn't show up until 2012.
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