Node.js has jumped the shark • Hacker News Board

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#11

Post by jchrisa » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:55 PM UTC

tl;dr;

Don't use JavaScript for numerical computation. Don't block your IO loops for CPU intensive stuff.

commentary:

I've never met a Node hacker who would ever do any of those things. This post should be called "Straw man Node.js n00bs jump the shark."

I've written web apps in a wide variety of dynamic languages, and you know what, I've never done anything CPU intensive in the request response loop, ever. This has nothing to do with Node, fibonacci in PHP is just as bad an idea (although it might take you a little longer to realize it, as you've probably got lots of PHP threads running behind your Apache).

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#12

Post by EGreg » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:55 PM UTC

And the point of this is?

You use Node.js for writing evented programs using Javascript. It is awesome for that. It is better than PHP, and a bunch of other solutions, for actually handling web clients. Heck, it brings us back to the days where we can handle the C10K problem without much work! And it's friggin Javascript!

All these politics are missing the point. This blog post is missing the point. Things SHOULD be simple. There SHOULD be an insanely fast evented solution to do things. And there is. Get over it.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#13

Post by markbao » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

This is the worst rant I've read in a while.

It starts with lambasting the fact that Ted Dziuba didn't intend the Fibonacci example to be the one role model of comparing Node.js and other languages, and then the Node.js community (or at least a few members of it) rallied around showing that Fibonacci was actually fast in Node. I agree with this. We should be talking about the big picture, not just single implementations.

Then, it goes on for 4 paragraphs about how slow Node.js was with Fibonacci.

Wasn't it the point that Fibonacci wasn't the point? If the point is to show that Node.js is inefficient with computation, and Fibonacci was just a dumb example, why was the rest of the article about the dumb example mentioned previous?

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#14

Post by wccrawford » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:58 PM UTC

Miky wrote: post #4

jevinskie wrote: post #3

Isn't it the point of all this madness that jumping the shark for these small and trivial problems is fun and thought provoking?

Jumping the shark is the moment when something, such as a TV show, or in this case a community around a web framework, begins to decline in quality beyond recovery, so “jumping the shark for these small and trivial problems” really doesn't make sense.

No, "jumping the shark" is a single event so monumentally stupid that the show can never recover from it.

Node.js didn't jump the shark. It has some stupid users, but what language doesn't? That he got stupid answers from the community doesn't mean Node.js itself is bad.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#15

Post by mschwar99 » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:59 PM UTC

Besides entertainment value doesn't all of this back and forth reduce down to the age old "use the right tool for the job in front of you"?

Node.js as it currently stands isn't the best solution for applications that will involve CPU intensive tasks. Perhaps at the outset of a project you don't know when and where those types of tasks will pop up so basing an entire architecture on it might be risky.

However, it seems to me that regardless of the above, there are tasks Node excels at and it would be silly to dismiss it as a technical solution all together. I'm building browser based games with it and love working with Node. The bulk of the logic is in the client and Node serves as the glue that allows people to play games together from different clients. Nothing I have read gives me pause about this implementation.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#16

Post by 9oliYQjP » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 5:00 PM UTC

Jumped the shark posts have jumped the shark.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#17

Post by chc » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 5:01 PM UTC

klochner wrote: post #2

Best part of the post was where someone suggested he increase his heap size to 1GB to get a fibonacci algorithm to run. After pointing this out, a member of the Node.js community (post now deleted) suggested I might have an obsolete version of Node with a 1GB heap limit and that I recompile without the 1GB restriction so that this retarded algorithm can continue eating up all my system RAM.

It is curious that an array with 1 million doubles would take anywhere near a gigabyte in V8. 1000000 * 8B is about 8MB. Even with 5000% overhead for the data structure itself, that's only 400MB. Where did the other 600 MB go?

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#18

Post by balloot » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 5:02 PM UTC

thenduks wrote: post #5

Hmm, sounds more like reddit is the thing that has jumped the shark :) Most people using Node I've had contact with are firmly in the 'right tool for the job' camp. No one sane does CPU intensive tasks inside the event loop... that's what delayed job processor stuff is for.

That's my takeaway as well. Who cares how long a webserver takes to do a Fibonacci loop anyway? The point of a web server is to process lots of relatively small requests quickly and concurrently. Testing node.js with a Fibonacci loop is like testing a Ferrari by seeing how much weight it can tow.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#19

Post by ender7 » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 5:02 PM UTC

All right guys, this is getting absurd.

I am having a ton of fun using NodeJS to actually build stuff. It's fast, it's scalable, it's maintainable, it's great.

Yet another pants-on-head troll has decided that NodeJS is a crime against his tech religion? I don't fucking care.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#20

Post by ctide » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 5:03 PM UTC

markbao wrote: post #13

This is the worst rant I've read in a while. It starts with lambasting the fact that Ted Dziuba didn't intend the Fibonacci example to be the one role model of comparing Node.js and other languages, and then the Node.js community (or at least a few members of it) rallied around showing that Fibonacci was actually fast in Node. I agree with this. We should be talking about the big picture, not just single implementati…

I thought the point of this article was to generate a cliff notes version of the last week of arguments, coming from the side of someone who thinks node is cancer. Why are we even discussing this?