Um, JavaScript is cool and all and you can use it in a lot of places, but for things beyond nontrivial apps, Node.js is going to be hard to scale to larger teams. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe having a bunch of smaller services talking to each other is the way to go, but so far node hasn't solved the inherent callback soup problem.
JavaScript is the future...maybe
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#32I'm baffled by people's obsession with finding The One Programming Language. Would the world be better off if everyone spoke and thought in only English?
I personally have often gotten the impression that a large portion of developers already have The One Programming Language in their mind. It's usually Java or C# or sometimes still C++.
JavaScript fills me with joy because it is so unlike these languages and I get to watch people grow when they stop kicking and screaming and learn it. JavaScript doesn't have any super unique features or anything; it's just so not Java while frequently being suddenly essential to people who think in Java.
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#33Um, JavaScript is cool and all and you can use it in a lot of places, but for things beyond nontrivial apps, Node.js is going to be hard to scale to larger teams. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe having a bunch of smaller services talking to each other is the way to go, but so far node hasn't solved the inherent callback soup problem.
I worked on a Node-backed website with a team for a year, and we had no problem with callback soup. However, we did use IcedCoffeeScript which made dealing with callbacks a lot easier. But, scalability-wise, programming in Node was no different from any other language. What do you think makes it hard to scale?
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#34This was a disappointing article. Rather than focusing on the strengths of javascript, the author is trying to sell TypeScript. There are many compile-to-javascript languages, but the real strength lies within javascript itself.
In my experience, the JS ecosystem is really strong. v8 really pushed the performance bar, and the upcoming features (stuff like Buffers/Views for contiguous memory) make it possible to write programs that look and behave like C programs. The breadth and depth of nontrivial open-source projects and code segments is impressive, and the IRC communities are fairly vibrant.
I tried an arithmetic benchmark to compare JS performance between node.js and vert.x. As it turns out, the JS implementations under node.js even smokes the Java implementations!
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#35As far as JavaScript goes he's not off the mark. The thing that saddens me a bit is that it's yet another post about a particular language/technology/thing. No language/technology/thing is better than another. It may be better than another in a particular context. This is as true for Android as it is for Visual Basic and Arduino. While this is obviously my personal opinion, I think the industry as a whole might benef…
No language/technology/thing is better than another. It may be better than another in a particular context. I don't really buy into this reasoning. If a given language is worse than every other in almost every context (the "global" context, if you will), then it's clearly an inferior language relative to the others. JavaScript does exhibit this. It has exactly one thing going for it: it's the only scripting language…
Its syntax is mediocre.
I would agree if you said language X is more expressive than Y, it can be proved. But isn't syntax totally subjective?
Missing critical features
Which critical features are missing?
Performance .. absymal
Well .. you would not notice any performance issues with typical web apps. You should try it.
Libraries are missing, are more bandages for its numerous problems
Github has an enormous collection of nodejs libraries. Which ones are bandages for language problems?
Tooling
I find text-editors and chrome better than IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio.
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#36I started programming with ruby, and was really pretty reluctant to move to less clean languages - it was just hard on my eyes when I was used to reading and writing clean and understandable ruby code.
But javascript won me over in the end, and I now write most of my apps with node. Totally unrelated to hype or to this article or to anything -- the reason why was mostly the challenges that came with switching to js. The two challenges that particularly intrigued me were:
- Making async code clean, readable, and manageable. As themgt mentioned, this is a really tough challenge. It took me months of going over and over my code, continually reading about promises and async flow control etc. to really "get it". And once I got it, it was really empowering, and the ability and choice to run pieces of code in parallel or in series (which you don't get at all with sync languages) is something I'm now very reluctant to give up.
- Writing code that has more syntax (braces, semicolons, low level loops, etc) and still making it clean and readable is a challenge that I think has improved the way I write all code for the better. It's so much more difficult to make javascript adhere to the cleanliness standards that I'm used to with ruby that I spend a lot more time thinking about how elegant and readable my code is and optimizing it for that purpose, which I think nobody would argue is a great thing for a developer to work on.
So without comment on whether javascript is "the" language or "the future", which, as other people have mentioned, is silly to speculate, I would strongly recommend picking up node and using it to build a few apps, if just for the purpose of dealing with the two points I mentioned above : )
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#37I'm baffled by people's obsession with finding The One Programming Language. Would the world be better off if everyone spoke and thought in only English?
I share the same opinion. I cannot understand why some developers fail to understand that we need different tools optimized for different types of tasks. It is like they are afraid of learning.
Because most languages are not optimized for a type of task, most languages are not DSLs. Most languages are "general purpose". I don't understand why so many people continually make this same comment.
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#38What important/high traffic sites run off Node?
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#39It might seem trite, but a CoffeeScript + TypeScript combination would make me very happy. I have been developing in TypeScript recently because the IDE support is awesome (and I'm a static typing enthusiast). Now if I could just reduce the verbosity and save some keystrokes...
Re: JavaScript is the future...maybe
#40What important/high traffic sites run off Node?
Trello.com hit a million users yesterday.