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Node.js has jumped the shark

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Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#32
post #21

I don't see how discussions like this signify the decline of NodeJS. Quite the opposite. Lots of people are thinking about how to do this kind of computation the right way, within the context of NodeJS. Honestly this discussion has kind of highlighted how bad almost all other platforms are and how much room for improvement there is.

Actually what I have found it has highlighted is just how many of the Node advocates completely and utterly fail to understand their competition. I really, really wanted to think it was just a few isolated people, but the evidence suggests that the meme that Node is actually some sort of multiprocessing breakthrough has spread further in the last few months, rather than dying out. So let me lay it out for you: Node's…

how many of the Node advocates completely and utterly fail to understand their competition

I agree, but as someone who is generally excited about Nodejs, I see it as necessary growing pains. These kinds of criticisms and back-and-forth and flamewars, if a language or platform is having them, it doesn't make it fade into obscurity, it forces it to mature, either technically or socially. It also has the benefit of bringing it's most ideological advocates down to earth. I feel as though I watched this whole process with Rails, which went from The Greatest Thing Ever(tm) to simply another framework with some big advantages to go with it's known disadvantages.

And now it's happening with Nodejs, and I think that's ultimately a good thing.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#33
post #21

I don't see how discussions like this signify the decline of NodeJS. Quite the opposite. Lots of people are thinking about how to do this kind of computation the right way, within the context of NodeJS. Honestly this discussion has kind of highlighted how bad almost all other platforms are and how much room for improvement there is.

Actually what I have found it has highlighted is just how many of the Node advocates completely and utterly fail to understand their competition. I really, really wanted to think it was just a few isolated people, but the evidence suggests that the meme that Node is actually some sort of multiprocessing breakthrough has spread further in the last few months, rather than dying out. So let me lay it out for you: Node's…

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Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#34
I'd like to point out that by the time this article was posted, and thanks to some constructive discussion about the approach, the node-fib "project" on github has been updated with a much faster recursive approach which doesn't use loads of memory and doesn't resort to memoisation, but still doesn't block the loop and serves almost as many requests/sec.

My point here, and in writing the lib in the first place was that naive implementations are naive in any language/vm. I lump splitting an algorithm across the loop into the same band as deciding this task should spawn a thread/worker. And using child processes as workers is still an option in node.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#35
post #25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Testing Ferrari by seeing how much weight it can tow would actually get you pretty useful performance metric. Point of this whole thing is that you cannot reasonably do complex computations in Node. While most "Web 2.0" applications probably does not need to do that in response to request, there are also many web applications that actually do something that might be reasonably called complex cpu-intensive processing…

This is a serious question, because I honestly don't know the answer. What purpose does node serve in more complex(i.e. non-static page) situations?

Should it just be the intermediary between the users and your database process? Heck, should the database process also handle all the formatting of the data as well as the queries? That is fairly CPU intensive(and doesn't scale well at all), especially if you're getting to larger data sets.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#36
post #30

Am I the only one that considers all of this ranting about Nodejs to be a little bit strange? I would have never expected a post that was obviously a troll to prompt this much of a reaction on both sides of an issue. That so many of these rants and counter rants made it to the front page of Hacker News is somewhat discouraging. I have been playing around with node for a few months, and I have tried to stay completely…

I think this post is about ridiculing the childish behavior of the Node.js fandom. I have to agree that I've never seen anything quite like this before except the Church of St. Jobs. I always thought that we software engineers are reasonable people. But apparently a subset of us aren't.

However reluctant I maybe to join in this time-wasting back and forth. I'm just glad that someone has taken the time to point out just how inexperienced the crowd and ridiculous the whole situation is. We have enough technology in the world already. We don't need another one that makes making mistakes so much easier than before.

Lastly, I'm extremely disgusted by the misleading tag lines Ryan Dahl put on Node's front page. Programming isn't easy. It can only be easy for so long. Scaling is even harder because it actually requires deep knowledge and insight into how computers and networks work, something that I very much doubt that many of the current Node.js crowd understands. If your solution to your multiprogramming problem is to spawn more Node.js processes, maybe you've picked the wrong tech.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#37
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…

the point was that putting any $computationally_expensive_fn in your event loop was a terrible idea. in this case he then did $computationally_expensive_fn = fib;

the point is, unless this event loop pretty much does nothing or hands off the work to a pool and returns immediately, it is utterly unscalable and needs a multiplexer to sit infront of it.

most servers do

while(1) { $conn = accept_conn(); new EventThread($conn); }

Thus it's simply multiplexed. Alternately most current other web languages take the approach of integrating with apache which does this one level [up/down?] and they don't have to worry about it at all.

The point is you can write safer code in other languages even if it is slower by it self. With node.js you can do some really dangerous things if you go it alone. You must deploy node with something else, but that's kind of an after thought left up to the dev, and loads won't because they are all under the mistaken impression that because node.js is faster than php/python etc that alone solves all problems and excuses them from sane scalable coding practices. At best it just puts it off a little further down the road. And anything built into a webserver doesn't have to worry, while node will.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#38
post #11

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…

If you've been following this argument from the beginning (I'm very sorry to say that I have), you'll notice that Ted's point is not that you WILL do CPU bound tasks in Node, but that Ryan Dahl's misleading statements on Node.js's front page is absurd. Of course no one with any sense will put CPU bound jobs on the same process/thread/event queue as the one processing the request. But you do have to realize, it is exactly that no one will ever do the above that renders Node's existence rather pointless. Threads/processes or events, you'll still pass off the heavily computational stuff to a different processing queue. Events or threads, when that single process starts topping out, you'll still have to launch another process. What makes Node.js different from any other technology that have come before? Nothing except that it comes with a server and it's written in JS. If you like the Node REPL and JS, that's fine, just don't propagate the urban myth that's on Node's front page. I think this is Ted's point IMHO.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#40
post #21

I don't see how discussions like this signify the decline of NodeJS. Quite the opposite. Lots of people are thinking about how to do this kind of computation the right way, within the context of NodeJS. Honestly this discussion has kind of highlighted how bad almost all other platforms are and how much room for improvement there is.

Actually what I have found it has highlighted is just how many of the Node advocates completely and utterly fail to understand their competition. I really, really wanted to think it was just a few isolated people, but the evidence suggests that the meme that Node is actually some sort of multiprocessing breakthrough has spread further in the last few months, rather than dying out. So let me lay it out for you: Node's…

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