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Node.js has jumped the shark

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Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#51

Post by exogen »

[deleted] wrote: post #45
exogen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, whoa. "Just as slow at handling?" It's most likely an order of magnitude faster at handling those. But you're right, deployment isn't a totally solved problem. Unless you just use Heroku: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/node-js I mean, Node was created in 2009. I don't see anybody bragging about how easy it is to deploy yet; just that it's fast and easy to understand.

[deleted]

It's possible I'm misinterpreting the results (or the benchmark is flawed), but this seems to imply that it is often the case: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#54

Post by InclinedPlane »

I'm just tired of this, it's beyond dumb.

I remember the spectacle of the Java hype machine and the dot-com 1.0 hype machine. In comparison the node.js hype doesn't even register on the meter. Moreover, I don't see a rash of people misusing node.js to the degree that is prevalent for pretty much every other web technology out there. Are some people going to misuse technology? Always. Is the node.js community out there trying to proselytize to the world, selling node as the solution to every problem on the planet for every developer on the planet regardless of whether it makes sense? Not in the least.

This is a faux-controversy.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#55

Post by AlexC04 »

EGreg wrote: post #12

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…

I'd never heard of the C10K (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) but I love scaling issues and this looks to be some fascinating reading. Thanks!

EDIT Interesting annecdote... Cal Henderson is the author of "Building Scalable Websites" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102356 and has worked in "the trenches" as the lead engineer of FLICKR and developer at B3TA.

Apparently his newest company http://tinyspeck.com/ is using node.js for their game engine.

Assuming he's planning on scaling to a reasonable size, that seems to be a pretty resounding endorsement that there's at least something going for it. I mean ... that guy's got a bit of experience in working at scale.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#56

Post by jarrett »

It seems we now have three camps:

1. "Node is the magic bullet."

2. "Node sucks."

3. "Nothing is that simple. Learn you some computer science."

#3 is the correct answer, but I'd like to see this point explored in more detail. The current back-and-forth isn't productive. What would be productive is if we had an informed discussion of what Node is good at, what not to do with it, and how it compares with other tools and approaches.

Specifically, I'd love to hear opinions on some of these points:

* Node is opinionated about threads. Negatively so. See http://nodejs.org/#about . Do you agree with these claims?

* Non-blocking IO doesn't solve every performance problem under the sun. Far from it. But what problems does it solve exceptionally well?

* Is Node a breakthrough in computer science? Events and callbacks have been around for ages. What new ideas does Node bring to the table?

* Why exactly is Node supposed to be so scalable? Is scaling to more machines easier with Node than with other approaches? How about scaling to more cores on the same machine? Does Node provide any special support for distributing a task across multiple workers and possibly over the network, e.g. with something like MapReduce?

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#57

Post by [deleted] »

wyuenho wrote: post #36
Spyro7 wrote: 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 ju…

[deleted]

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#59

Post by [deleted] »

wonnage wrote: post #41
Spyro7 wrote: 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…

The whole target of his dissatisfaction is this quote on the Node home page: "Almost no function in Node directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks. Because nothing blocks, less-than-expert programmers are able to develop fast systems." That's bullshit. Evented programming isn't some magical fairy dust. If your request handler takes 500ms to run, you're not going to somehow serve more than two requests per se…

[deleted]

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#60

Post by jrockway »

wyuenho wrote: post #36
Spyro7 wrote: 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 ju…

I've seen it from the following communities: PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, C++, C, C#, Haskell, Emacs, Vim, Common Lisp, and Scheme.

People are tribal. Some people are attracted to tribes, become attached without really knowing why, and start having the strong urge to fuck with the other tribes. Apparently this was good for the survival of the human race. Perhaps it's a bug now that we should consciously compensate for, like the desire to eat a box of doughnuts. mmm.... doughnuts... Good when you were a caveman. Bad when you sit in front of a desk for 16 hours a day and sleep for the other 8.

What's the alternative to scaling an application by running multiple copies? Scaling an application by running multiple threads? Exact same thing. The only advancement over this model is when the runtime can automatically parallelize your code, and you actually scale linearly when it does that. In the mean time, if you use a database server and not an in-memory database, guess what, you're "using queues" and "scaling by starting processes". People do it because it's easy and it works.

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