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Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

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Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#191

Post by [deleted] »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #102
sametmax wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the others say. And also, golang tried no centralized package management by using git repo. It didn't end with people go getting from moving masters. Of course they did. And in an area of finally accepting lock files, do you really want to go back in middle age ? Lock files are not a constraint. They are a god saver. You want lock files. You don't want to have either vague dependencies or pin pointed ones. You n…

You are imagining the worst possible execution of these ideas. Nobody is proposing that you should start using libraries that pull in code from random domains, unless you have some specific need to. Whitelisting sources is such an obvious step, given the security focus, that you should really have applied the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity in your speculation.

[deleted]

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#192

Post by pknopf »

zemo wrote: post #61
rb808 wrote: post #46

Interesting that he's unsure about Go. Would be nice to hear about why. One huge strength about Node (&Deno) is having the same language and tools on the front end and back end. Its a huge benefit to have a team on one language, even if it might not be the optimal choice. I'm not sure if that is the problem he had with Go though.

the point of Go is to have one language that's the best of both dynamic and static languages. the point of Rust is to be safe and fast. if you're building an infrastructure where you're externalizing the dynamic language runtime, such that there's always a host and a guest language, Go isn't necessarily optimized to act as a host language in that context. Rust is, at the expense of being arguably more tedious to prog…

He isn't (wouldn't be) using Rust for a dynamic runtime. It would be strictly for bootstrapping V8 and a ffi. With the ffi, you interop with whatever net stack you want.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#193

Post by DenisM »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #177
royjacobs wrote: post #121

I think it's quite interesting to see that originally node.js was presented as a bloat-free alternative to "enterprise languages" like Java, C# or even Python or Ruby. A lot of complexity was subsequently added in an ad-hoc way which has resulted in (for example) a package management system that's wildly out of control. It's very popular of course, so I'm definitely not arguing that metric. However, the stuff that wa…

It's always like this. I'm lucky enough to have been around the industry for a while. I could probably count a dozen or more things that started out "Like X, only without all the BS!" --- only to end up with just as much BS or more than X ever had.

It's an anthropological effect, not a technological one. A new generation of craftsmen faces a choice between submitting to the rules of the old guard and making up their own rules.

Reduced complexity is often a rallying cry, but I think the root of the phenomenon is in trying to find one's own social and professional standing in the situation where all the prominent positions are already taken and what little is left requires years of hard labor (complexity, certification, corporate review system, etc).

If this situation upsets you consider the alternatives, they might be worse.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#195

Post by gcommer »

pan69 wrote: post #190

I've said it before and I say it again; NodeJS is an infrastructure component, not a general purpose application runtime environment. I totally recognise the IO problem in our connected world and NodeJS really does solve the problem around the "many simultaneously persistent connections", something that would be really hard to do without something like NodeJS. In essence (and in my humble opinion) NodeJS is basically…

https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers Is a project that enables writing code this way. It's used, for example, in webdriver.io so that you can write synchronous test code that transparently (ie, without `await`) calls out to async helpers.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#196

Post by tree_of_item »

pan69 wrote: post #190

I've said it before and I say it again; NodeJS is an infrastructure component, not a general purpose application runtime environment. I totally recognise the IO problem in our connected world and NodeJS really does solve the problem around the "many simultaneously persistent connections", something that would be really hard to do without something like NodeJS. In essence (and in my humble opinion) NodeJS is basically…

This is a solved problem. async/await makes your async code look sync. This is a strange thing to focus on IMO.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#197

Post by isoos »

darzu wrote: post #122
munificent wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the Dart team (but I don't speak for the entire team here). Dart had two initial goals: 1. Get a native Dart VM into Chrome and eventually other browsers. 2. Get a significant number of client-side web developers that were using JavaScript to move to Dart. It's probably not obvious, but these goals are in tension with each other. In order to motivate adding a giant new VM to a browser, you need to make the lan…

How would you characterize the positioning of Dart with respect to Go? Dart is for client-side, Go is for server-side? I'm also curious if you see having separate languages for these roles as desirable or just incidental.

Disclaimer: I've been working with Dart for 5+ years now, I'm running several small server-side Dart apps myself, and I also contribute to the Dart app that is behind pub.dartlang.org

The Dart VM itself is great for server-side, however Google is focusing on the mobile and web tooling and support. While they do develop server-side packages e.g. for AppEngine-, gRPC-, or Memcache-support, connecting to databases like Postgresql is through a community-supported package, and sometimes it is hard to find an actively developed one.

Considering these limits, there are still good server-side frameworks, and there exists couple of big full-stack Dart applications. I've created a HackerNews-crawler twitter-bot (@DartHype) in a matter of hours in Dart, and it is running almost unchanged since then. Not that it is a big feat, but it was an easy thing to implement given the ecosystem.

If you have a fresh project, and you can select your database and other parts of your stack, Dart can be a good choice. Depending on the domain, the performance is close to the one in Go, or in Java VM, and it is much easier for beginner to pick up than other languages, while the tooling provides more safety than JavaScript or TypeScript.

However, if you need to connect to Sybase, it may not be the best choice.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#198

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

tlrobinson wrote: post #115

I'm glad to hear he (and the Node community in general) has come back around to promises. I remember the very early version of Node.js that had them (looks like they were added in v0.1.0 and removed in v0.1.30), although they weren't true chainable promises we have now.

Dear god no. Promises are ruining the best thing node had going for it: Its beautiful lisp like async model.

Promises add hidden state, corner cases and incompatible libraries for very little gain.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#199

Post by isoos »

sametmax wrote: post #91
pvsukale3 wrote: post #60

Can anyone explain why he called Dart a complete failure? https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=19m55s ps: I am a junior developer. I am taking up Dart to learn Mobile apps development using Flutter.

There is only one metrics in programming language: popularity. Not quality. Not elegance. Not features. Not performance. The Dart community is ridiculously small compared to anything to the competition, despite the heavy investment in it.

I have got to know a few small teams in my local area, developing in niche languages (including Haxe and Dart), and they do not talk about it on forums or on meetups. They are busy developing their product, and the platform's the quality and features help them, the performance is good, and they don't care what the rest of the world thinks with the current hype trends that would fade soon anyway.

I lost track how many times I've heard my friends cursing JS and even TypeScript, and telling me they wish they could use a sane language instead. Well, you actually can, and I believe should.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#200

Post by tree_of_item »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #198
tlrobinson wrote: post #115

I'm glad to hear he (and the Node community in general) has come back around to promises. I remember the very early version of Node.js that had them (looks like they were added in v0.1.0 and removed in v0.1.30), although they weren't true chainable promises we have now.

Dear god no. Promises are ruining the best thing node had going for it: Its beautiful lisp like async model. Promises add hidden state, corner cases and incompatible libraries for very little gain.

Can you explain why you think Lisp is involved here?
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