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Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

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Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#341

Post by grosjona »

didibus wrote: post #317
royjacobs wrote: post #121

I think it's quite interesting to see that originally node.js was presented as a bloat-free alternative to "enterprise languages" like Java, C# or even Python or Ruby. A lot of complexity was subsequently added in an ad-hoc way which has resulted in (for example) a package management system that's wildly out of control. It's very popular of course, so I'm definitely not arguing that metric. However, the stuff that wa…

I think the truth is even sadder. The new generations hear the complaints of the old. They hear, I hate spring, Java is so bloated, XML hell, etc. So they think damn I don't want to touch Java with a ten foot poll. That's when they go instead with the newer system, that didn't exist long enough to have accumulated criticism. Which is backed by enthusiasts still in the honeymoon period.

Yes so true. People should spend more time thinking about the side effects of their actions and speeches before they make them.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#343

Post by PinkMilkshake »

grosjona wrote: post #341
didibus wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth is even sadder. The new generations hear the complaints of the old. They hear, I hate spring, Java is so bloated, XML hell, etc. So they think damn I don't want to touch Java with a ten foot poll. That's when they go instead with the newer system, that didn't exist long enough to have accumulated criticism. Which is backed by enthusiasts still in the honeymoon period.

Yes so true. People should spend more time thinking about the side effects of their actions and speeches before they make them.

No, people should speak what they believe to be true. The onus is on the listeners to not blindly accept everything they hear as reality.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#344

Post by j45 »

megaman22 wrote: post #300
josho wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the loop is necessarily bad, it shows progress. Think about Java, it solved a class of problems that C was unable to address (e.g. unsafe memory, native threads). Thus enabling a new class of programs. But the new class of programs created opportunities for new platforms to solve with the benefit of a clean slate and fresh design having learned from past successes and failures.

I'm increasingly sketical. Maybe we move ahead a few inches each cycle, but it's starting to look distressingly like each generation of programmers has to learn all the lessons that their greybeard predecessors learned the hard way. Then, when they acheived some level of enlightenment, the next batch of bright-eyed whippersnappers comes along to rinse and repeat. There's a disturbingly low-level of historical knowled…

It's interesting to place today's techs on the Java maturation timeline - each became what they thought they hated but realized may have existed for some necessary reasons.

New platforms bring exciting and meaningful evolution often at the cost of what techs like .net and Java have a few decade advantage in. It's also interesting to see what Java devs are innovating with themselves, Scala, Kotlin both have good things happening.

Maybe using one large, inter-syntax friendly world like JVM will help.

When experience is overlooked for youth, we relearn and reimplement the same libraries repeatedly in every new tech to feed some developers needs to build temples to their greatness.

Still, Fitzgeralds quote comes to mind... "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." and technology is held back by reinventing the wheel.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#345

Post by mschuetz »

blattimwind wrote: post #123
mschuetz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> performance and security from running JavaScript outside of a browser. I'm just now building a node app to filter point clouds, so lots of number crunching. In two days I've got something in javascript that's faster than the C++ solution I've been working on for a week. Mostly because javascript/node makes it trivial to parallelize file IO while doing work in the main thread. This app reads 13 million points from 1…

> (File reads were cached by OS and/or disk due to repeated testing, but file writes probably not) Unless you flush the pages manually, your dirty pages (written files) live on long after your process died. Depending on system and configuration, minutes or even hours can pass before they are flushed to disk.

Do you know about best practices to benchmark with uncached data? It's something I've been wondering about for a long time and I've seen many attempts at benchmarking things without regard for disk caching. e.g. benchmarking in-memory data bases to out-of-core databases but because of caching due to repeated runs, the results were meritless since the out-of-core databases had their stuff in memory as well.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#346

Post by pjmlp »

hshehehjdjdjd wrote: post #270
pspeter3 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Go does this for me for the most part

Go has been out for almost a decade and they’re still working on the package management story.

Let alone G* when CLU had them in 1975, but lets not rush.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#347

Post by pjmlp »

i_made_a_booboo wrote: post #290
p2t2p wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This why I love Java so much. Take a look at what Spring Boot does for me: - Routing is done in two lines of code: @Controller @RequestMapping("/myroute") - Cookie and body parsing - no need to write any code to do that, I just have method parameters and all of the data flies in. Whant a validation? Only one keyword on a method parameter - @Valid. Custom validators are supported as well. - Session management. It just…

I'm switching to Rails after doing years of Spring Boot apps. The bloat of Java is 3x to 5x.

Good luck running it fast enough.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#348

Post by flukus »

pknopf wrote: post #274
jrochkind1 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a story that gets repeated lots of times in our world of open source software dev. 1. X is SO bloated and poorly engineered full of bad legacy decisions. 2. We can totally do better let's invent a new thing, Y! 3. Wow, Y is so clean and fast and understandable. 4. But it doesn't do this thing a bunch of people reasonably really need... let's add it. (repeat 3 and 4 a few hundred times) 5. Y is so bloa…

How do you break the loop?

I think vi -> vim -> neovim shows a pretty good model.

Neovim is an effort to modernize and remove cruft from vim, so they get to keep all the good parts and throw out the backward compatibility. If it works out it can eventually replace vim, not to different to what vim did to vi.

I'd like to see similar stuff done to much of the GNU tools. Make for instance has to worry about backward compatibility and posix compliance that makes it hard to progress. As of today there have been about 12,000 attempts to replace it with something else and I find all of them inferior for one reason or another, they've all reinvented the wheel poorly. If someone had taken the fork and modernize approach we might have something better by now.

It doesn't even have to be a "hostile" fork. The same can be done by the developers of the existing tools.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#349

Post by dozzie »

chrisco255 wrote: post #217
dozzie wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The context switch between apps is one cost you have to pay [...]. However, the costs of switching languages is higher. Is it? I was working with a system where server is written in Erlang and client (and another server) is written in Python. No problems with switching back and forth.

Yes, that's a cost your brain is paying. And a higher cost if you bring on new devs to that project, who then need to learn and understand both Python and Elixir. Debugging is different in both languages, libraries are different, standards, conventions, top level APIs, runtimes, capabilities, all that has to be understood to operate at a high level. That's a non-zero cost and it's pretty significant. That you've lear…

>> I was working with a system where server is written in Erlang and client (and another server) is written in Python. No problems with switching back and forth.

> Yes, that's a cost your brain is paying.

What cost? I said I haven't noticed any.

> new devs [...] then need to learn and understand both Python and Elixir.

No, they don't need to learn even a speck of Elixir.

--

What you described is a trusim that one needs to learn two languages to write in two languages. Yes, this is obviously true. What I'd like to hear is an argument that switching between them used in a single system is costly, because I haven't observed that. This is what I discuss with, not with that learning another language has its cost.

Re: Things I Regret About Node.js [video]

#350

Post by megaman22 »

j45 wrote: post #344
megaman22 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm increasingly sketical. Maybe we move ahead a few inches each cycle, but it's starting to look distressingly like each generation of programmers has to learn all the lessons that their greybeard predecessors learned the hard way. Then, when they acheived some level of enlightenment, the next batch of bright-eyed whippersnappers comes along to rinse and repeat. There's a disturbingly low-level of historical knowled…

It's interesting to place today's techs on the Java maturation timeline - each became what they thought they hated but realized may have existed for some necessary reasons. New platforms bring exciting and meaningful evolution often at the cost of what techs like .net and Java have a few decade advantage in. It's also interesting to see what Java devs are innovating with themselves, Scala, Kotlin both have good thing…

The biggest problem i see is the weird hole circa 2006 that arranges with Sun selling to Oracle, that kind of still-birthed Java as the next great language.

That hole I can credit as giving C# the advantage in that tight niche, and stilling the development of the JVM platform in general.

By the time that the rust on JVM improvements were dusted off, all initiative was lost. Java was playing catchup to the competition.

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