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“Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

harmful.cat-v.org

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#11
Didn't read that, because title is enough for me. But usually people who hate javascript are those who didn't learn and understand it properly. I mean very basics, like concurrency model and event loop. I saw so many monstrosities in production, like checking for result of some async call, with setTimeout. No wonder, people who wrote that code, hate js.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#12

Javascript is the Visual Basic of the 201x's. Like Visual Basic-- it convinced people who otherwise had no idea what they were doing that they were programmers. It's fun for the rest of us CS/Math guys to sit back and watch you JS programmers discover things we learned 40 years ago. :-)

According to the article, the node.js community hates itself. They are lucky as it seems as soon as they join the "rest of you", no one will hate them anymore.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#13

What morbid nonsense. I don't think there's a single language or framework that I haven't heard this about. None of our tools are perfect, but great software has been written with all of them anyway, and lots of people have enjoyed working with those tools along the way. If you don't like a tool, switch or build a better one. Don't write long borderline-nihilistic blog posts about how everything is terrible and we're…

That's generally true. However, when the creator of a popular language/framework disses it himself, it carries a different kind of weight that can't be easily dispelled by your argument.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#14

Javascript is the Visual Basic of the 201x's. Like Visual Basic-- it convinced people who otherwise had no idea what they were doing that they were programmers. It's fun for the rest of us CS/Math guys to sit back and watch you JS programmers discover things we learned 40 years ago. :-)

Given the number of CS/Math guys who don’t understand the basics of prototypical object systems and try to make every OOP system fit into the C++ model... I wouldn’t throw stones there.

Most of the concepts in JS date back to Scheme and the Actor Pattern languages of the 70s & 80s.

In other words: you really don’t know what you’re talking about.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#15
"Of all the ways of doing concurrency, callbacks are by far the worst," Why? Working with callbacks on a solo thread has proved to be more performant I/O wise than threads.

"for any other problem anything else will be much better than Node.js, even PHP."

Why?

While it might be true to certain extend (i.e. Node not being the right solution for many cases), this article is just filled with baseless arguments.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#16
post #10

What morbid nonsense. I don't think there's a single language or framework that I haven't heard this about. None of our tools are perfect, but great software has been written with all of them anyway, and lots of people have enjoyed working with those tools along the way. If you don't like a tool, switch or build a better one. Don't write long borderline-nihilistic blog posts about how everything is terrible and we're…

Why not? Is there something wrong with expressing an opinion about a programming language. You've just expressed a similar opinion about their right to expression.

It pushes too hard, it's not balanced nor it is fair. There are articles which generally criticize js that I've bookmarked, but this is mostly expressing emotion not so much opinion.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#17
post #3

The main argument is that "of all the ways of doing concurrency, callbacks are by far the worst". I tend to agree. Now we have async/await, I think there is no problem.

But it's funny, isn't it?

Callbacks were advertised as the reason why one should use node. They're a foundation of JS.

Then they got covered up by promises. And now, with async await, we're back full circle towards the style of a more linear programming language such as python.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#19
post #15

"Of all the ways of doing concurrency, callbacks are by far the worst," Why? Working with callbacks on a solo thread has proved to be more performant I/O wise than threads. "for any other problem anything else will be much better than Node.js, even PHP." Why? While it might be true to certain extend (i.e. Node not being the right solution for many cases), this article is just filled with baseless arguments.

The consistency of node's standard lib alone is a good reason to use node instead of PHP.

Re: “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)

#20
I hear the main complaint in Node.JS, and even in Go too, is that the error handling is too verbose, eg you can not wipe all fail cases under the rug, they will litter your code and stare annoyingly at you like "hey, you have not handled me". And the code will fail spectacularly, while I guess some developers rather have silent errors with the motto "what I can not see can not hurt me". It gets unbearable for the CRUD app developers when each SQL line needs to have it's own error handling and you have to think about in what order and when to send the SQL queries, where as in traditional "skin your database" programming framework everything is done synchronously. But now we have async/await and you can just await, await, await, and even "forget" about the catch, or that everything is done asynchronously under the hood.
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