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Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

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Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#141
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's true that Node is losing traction.

I see this more as a return to reality from Node.js's astronomical levels of hype. The use cases for a single-threaded web server are specific and limited in the real world. Node.js will continue to solve those use cases (simple web server for static content or I/O bound apps) but the resultant decline will lead some to believe that the framework is dying.

I have come to believe that the truth about Node is somewhere in the middle: not severely limited, as you imply, but probably not fit to dominate the server ecosystem, either.

I develop on .NET all day, every day, building enterprise CRUD apps with fairly cutting-edge capabilities, for small-to-medium-sized companies. I suspect that Node would fit the server role quite handily if we bothered to port our hand-rolled client-side framework to it. But, as the lady said: "Ain't nobody got time for that."

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#142
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a point to be made about Docker, even though it hasn't been forked. The prevailing sentiment in yesterday's thread about the new Docker announcements was one of worry over whether it was too much of a land grab by the people at Docker, Inc and whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology but will almost certainly do so at some p…

> whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology We trusted free software for a long time before we needed to call it open source to make it sound palatable to less visionary business leaders. We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the peo…

>We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.

If they aren't volunteers doing it for fun, though, they wont, unless someone pays them.

And even some very popular FOSS projects millions of people use have just one or two overworked maintainers and not much in the way of funding or contributions.

So FOSS is no magic bullet "as long as the code is open and there are users the project will be worked on".

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were in this position, I would accept it from a frequent contributor to the project. I don't like the idea of someone poking around to make one-word non-functional changes.

> one-word non-functional changes What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds. Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessi…

> What about typos in docs?

In my opinion these trivial changes should be submitted as text in a bug report rather than patches or pull requests. For brevity a regex statement like s/foo/baz/ can be used.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#144
post #9

Ben Noordhuis, the center of the Node.js pronoun scandal [1] and one of the founders of Strongloop, has activity in IO.js more recent than his activity in Node.js. I can't help but wonder how much of this is a power struggle between Strongloop and Joyent. https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Reminds me of the Docker/Rocket situation, at least in the monetary sense. Node.js became big, money went to heads, and here we are.

What part of

"it has to do with developers getting really frustrated at the stalled pace of development on the Joyent branch"

is so hard to understand? Cuz this gets incessantly repeated in a calm, rational manner by people involved with the branch.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were in this position, I would accept it from a frequent contributor to the project. I don't like the idea of someone poking around to make one-word non-functional changes.

> one-word non-functional changes What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds. Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessi…

> Is a gendered word really different?

Yes. A typo is objectively wrong (as objectively as you can be in such matters, anyway). Gendered words is a matter of style. One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine, to mix them, to avoid them altogether... and it's not clear which are better. Avoiding gendered pronouns altogether might be easier on the eyes for some people, for other people it seems confusing (singular they, what?), for others it is simply grating and hard to read, etc. Similar trade offs for the other options, of course.

We might as well have people who object to words that they interpret as being offensive, like using the word "right" to indicate "correct" or "good". They might feel that it is biased towards right handed people, and that argument seems to actually have some linguistic precedent - even other than English, "right" in some Germanic languages is also a synonym for "higher", another word with "good" connotations. Even beyond this far-fetched scenario, consider all words that could be argued to have a sexist background. Do we ban all of them, or do we just accept that although they have a nasty history, that history does not necessarily translate to how we intend to use them in this day and age?

I also remember some troll on GitHub that started to complain to a lot of repositories - after the Node.js controversy - that their documentation was being sexist. And many of the owners fell straight for it, because apparently it was a well executed troll, and/or they didn't want to risk being dismissive (because, you know, that could end badly for them).

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#146

>Node was created by software developer Ryan Dahl as a way of building and running entire online applications with JavaScript—the standard programming language for writing code that runs in your browser. Really? I thought that they intentionally choose javascript because it doesn't have any features like threading. > The massively popular programming framework Ruby on Rails, for instance, is still sponsored by its cr…

While I think abandoning threading was originally a good move because it spawned (no pun intended) new methods of chaining callbacks together, I'm concerned that there is really no way out of callback hell by way of callbacks. So I'm wondering if Node.js, Io.js or both will embrace coroutines, yield and generators. The real danger of threads was always shared memory, not so much simultaneous execution. I'm hoping tha…

If you want to get out of callback hell, I Promise you'll enjoy this library called Bluebird.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I've never seen any synchronization code (e.g., locks) in JavaScript. If multiple threads can execute async tasks in parallel, doesn't that mean JavaScript needs synchronization primitives? Most JS code I've seen in the wild relies implicitly on the single-threaded assumption—that only one callback (for example) will run at a time.

Say you wanna make an HTTP request. What node will do is kick off the process (dns, grab a socket, connect tcp, write the header, wait for response etc.)... but it won't wait for any of this to finish, it just starts it on another thread. That thread doesn't need any JS-level synchronization because it has nothing to do with JS. Furthermore, you can kick off multiple requests like this in parallel. When a request is…

This is not done in parallel. Only one block of javascript is being executed at any given time. There is also no concept of preemption, if your function runs forever no other other events or callbacks will be handled.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#148
post #7

I believe given the nature of those that forked it, we'll be replacing Node.JS with IO.JS (that is awkward to write) soon in http://Clara.io . I think that the confusion around Node.JS versus IO.JS will persist for some time though. If I wasn't a regular HN reader, I would have missed this completely.

You're not the only one. iojs is already pulling ahead in momentum, fixes, features. Not to mention it has a bazillion logos to choose from haha

I must be missing something. What features has io.js added?

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#149
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one-word non-functional changes What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds. Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessi…

> Is a gendered word really different? Yes. A typo is objectively wrong (as objectively as you can be in such matters, anyway). Gendered words is a matter of style. One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine, to mix them, to avoid them altogether... and it's not clear which are better. Avoiding gendered pronouns altogether might be easier on the eyes for some people, for other people it see…

>One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine //

In English the neuter pronoun is identical to the masculine. "to stop him" doesn't assume that he is male nor female it is agnostic on this point. Unless there is some other indication of the sex of the subject being referred to then you can't necessarily tell. Of course the reason for the use of the masculine pronoun as the neuter is probably historically based in language education being mainly provided to men, but that doesn't mean it needs to be "corrected".

Excepting that point I think I'd agree with what you said.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#150
post #60
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of MySQL. While I wouldn't call it dead by any measure it certainly suffered when the spit happened.

Yeah, but how much of that was due to forking and how much of that was folks realising that PostgreSQL is much better than MySQL for most metrics of better?

I think most of that was because of Oracle buying Sun. The MariaDB for and Postgres's rising popularity are the outcomes of that.
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