Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

First, no it's not. I just checked. 1 out of 12 projects on my laptop have c dependancies.

Second, wheels allow installing c dep tranparently now. And the top 20 c dep have wheels for windows, mac and most linux.

We have, I haven’t personally done any of it in production because I didn’t really see a reason to use it over node. My coworkers did a few pocs though, and initially had to spend a lot of time actually getting it to work with deployment. I have no idea why that was, you’d expect it to just work considering it’s a complete Microsoft setup, but it didn’t work out.

So it was a terribly expensive poc, because our most expensive resource is the time developers/operations spend. I mean, core is more performant than node technically, but as far as cost-efficiency goes, time to market is just much more important than technical performance in our organization. We have a lot of iron, and we don’t have a lot of users. We’re a muniplacity of average size after all, the most simultaneous visitors we’ve ever had across every system we operate is in the tens of thousands.

As far as development goes, I don’t think there is much difference between core and standard, but I’ll admit that I haven’t looked into it since 1.0.

We’re in this weird spot where we’re using more and more powershell and azure orchestration for back-end services that used to be powered by C#. A lot of that has also moved from development to operations, so that development is mainly focused on building APIs, working with data-sets or building various minor web/mobile apps, and Node + JS is just working out better than everything else.

We’ve tried core, we’ve tried Django and flask, we’ve tried a bunch of other stuff, but for getting an app up and running the same hour you start building it? Well, node just works for us.

I’m not saying node or JS are better than .Net though, I don’t think it is and I’d still prefer Java or C# if I was building something major.

I only introduce new dependencies into my system when I see them as strictly necessary. I am completely satisfied with my alternative implementations of those components (this is in contrast to the IDE question, where I at least see the benefit of tools like autocomplete that the IDE provides, but choose not to use it because the benefit of simplicity is greater). Given the rage and anger the OP directs against Maven, I think I am completely justified in that choice.

Ok, so there's some new mechanisms?

That's not so much the issue - as Python package/dependency problems are not so much a problem of 'how it works' - it's an issue because nobody is on the same page. It's byzantine.

If python dependencies boiled down to 'point to a directory' well then fine, everything would work that way and we'd build tools around it, docs would be clear etc. etc..

But as someone who uses Python seldom and loves the syntax, I generally stay away from it mostly for that reason.

And lack of typing which is obviously another discussion.

I can understand where you are coming from, and I often follow a rather similar approach where I will implement things myself if the alternative is depending on some unwieldy beast of a dependency.

(I did write my own Servlet engine for a project once, and it was faster than Jetty, and had better GC characteristics at the time, but in the end I ditched it for Jetty as I didn't want to maintain a complete HTTP implementation - that wasn't key to the project. The extra performance and the dependencies I got rid of were just not worth the extra effort).

However the reason I always chose to use JUnit was because I wanted the unit tests to be familiar to other developers since this is often where people go to understand how a piece of code works. In a sense it was a part of Java at the time. And I chose Maven for similar reasons. Plus the fact that Maven wasn't something you could really escape from in Java. Sooner or later it rears its head and I thought I would cause less pain if I just accepted that.

I like the idea behind Maven: convention over configuration, but I've never been a fan of how that idea has been executed. It could have been better if someone more experienced (and obsessive) had designed it way back when.

I still think Gradle is worse than Maven though. I'm not a fan of scriptable build systems, they should be declarative (and most of the time when people think they need to script things they just haven't bothered to learn how to use the tools). And even if you use Gradle, you can't really escape dealing with Maven.

(I ditched Java a couple of years back, so I haven't done Java for a while. I'm not overly fond of Oracle, so I had promised myself that I would stop using Java as soon as I found a replacement language that suited me. It took a few years, but I eventually found a different language I liked even better: Go)