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Node.js has jumped the shark

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Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#81

Post by Tichy »

jbooth wrote: post #64
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…

So, I'm not a node.js guy, and nothing against it, but being a server-side guy in general, I'll paraphrase a quote that Zed Shaw paraphrased from Chinese Kung Fu novels: "So the intermediate guy is doing all of these backflips and spinning roundhouse kicks and all that, it's very impressive, you couldn't imagine being in that good control of your body. He decides he's pretty good and spars with a master. The master b…

Except that event-driven io is actually the simpler solution compared to threads, isn't it?

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#82

Post by skeptical »

jarrett wrote: post #56

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 an…

+1 I like node (and ringojs) because it's a cool javascript interpreter with a nice set of libraries for practical use.

I can buy the argument that node's single thread architecture can make things faster, but not before understanding why. I've googled this quite a lot every now and then since node showed up but noone is willing to explain why, every one just assumes is faster, lighter and easy to scale for some reason. Not doubting the slightest bit, just would like to know why is that so.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#83

Post by Tichy »

mhd wrote: post #77
grandalf wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's his critique of queues?

It's here: http://teddziuba.com/2011/02/the-case-against-queues.html TL;DR - It's not so much about queues, but about stacks, i.e. new software stacks. His proposition is that quite often you're better off with existing systems. He specifically mentions syslog, so you're logging your tasks and then the consumers monitor this log. Prevents data loss and lets you potentially restart lost tasks. (That's his argument. I'…

He seems to argue against having a blocking worker wait for the queue, which is exactly what you wouldn't do with Node.js

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#84

Post by Androsynth »

9oliYQjP wrote: post #16

Jumped the shark posts have jumped the shark.

Jumping the shark means some organization has run out of ideas for one of its products and ends up resorting to the absurd to keep people interested. I'm not sure how this relates to node.js.

From my perspective, there was an over-abundance of node.js articles on HN between 6 and 12 months ago. It got to the point where there was a huge backlash and since then there has been relatively minimal coverage of node.js. In other words, node has transitioned from its rapidly fluctuating transient state to its long-term steady state and articles like this just won't resonate with anyone anymore.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#85

Post by skeptical »

jrockway wrote: post #60
wyuenho wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

__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__

That this tribal behavior occurs among software engineering is a rather disappointing fact. Computers are pretty much the edge of technology in many aspects, technological achievements by Mankind should be the prove that we're able to use our brains in more advanced ways than basic instincts and produce great achievements like modern software.

This flood of programmers that prefers to join a tribe instead of enjoying the good things from many different 'tribes' just makes me wonder how many of us are really devoted to do something useful/positive.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#86

Post by zedshaw »

jrockway wrote: post #48

This article is terrible. It boils down to "Ted stirred up some shit in the node community, which I like to troll because I wrote my own programming language and see node as the enemy. As a result of the shit-stirring, people that don't know much about programming defended node. Meanwhile, I wrote my own programming language that nobody uses because nobody is as smart as me, the creator. What's up dawg?" OK. You have…

> You've got to filter the noise out. Don't submit every article about something to HN. Don't tell your friends "hey, read this article about a guy memoizing fib, completely missing the point that it was an example CPU-bound algorithm". This is all noise, people that don't know what they're talking about talking.

>... Programming is hard. Let's stop blogging.

The problem with this sentiment is right now too many programmers equate popularity with quality. Their only esthetic is "X number of people follow the project on github". Combine this with the relative inexperience of most programmers and we've got a situation where you can easily flood the market with shitty technologies that only work because everyone believes in them, not because they actually work.

I'm not really talking about Node here, but more your assertion that "this is all noise and us serious real programmers should ignore it". The sad reality is, real serious programmers should speak out about shitty popular technologies before every job requires "20 years Node.js experience".

I'd love for the state of the art to be defined by the state of the art, but sadly, it's currently defined by the best marketing and propaganda. Answering that propaganda with criticism and writing better software is the real answer.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#87

Post by j_baker »

Tichy wrote: post #81
jbooth wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I'm not a node.js guy, and nothing against it, but being a server-side guy in general, I'll paraphrase a quote that Zed Shaw paraphrased from Chinese Kung Fu novels: "So the intermediate guy is doing all of these backflips and spinning roundhouse kicks and all that, it's very impressive, you couldn't imagine being in that good control of your body. He decides he's pretty good and spars with a master. The master b…

Except that event-driven io is actually the simpler solution compared to threads, isn't it?

It depends, but I don't think either one is inherently simpler than the other. As a general rule of thumb, I find that asynchronous solutions are generally better for I/O bound stuff while threads are better for computationally expensive stuff.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#88

Post by zedshaw »

ender7 wrote: post #19

All right guys, this is getting absurd. I am having a ton of fun using NodeJS to actually build stuff . It's fast, it's scalable, it's maintainable, it's great. Yet another pants-on-head troll has decided that NodeJS is a crime against his tech religion? I don't fucking care.

Actually, this is getting pretty funny. Don't bring your logic and reason to this and ruin for those of us who just bought a bag of popcorn.

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#89

Post by SkyMarshal »

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 always thought that we software engineers are reasonable people. But apparently a subset of us aren't."

Unfortunately no one is immune to it, not even engineers, scientists, Wall St., etc. I try to remind myself of this and keep my baser instincts in check by periodically rereading pieces like Charlie Munger's 'On the Psychology of Human Misjudgement'[1], the list of logical fallacies [2], and anything I can find relating to the psychology and neuroscience of judgement, decision making, perception and bias. Becoming emotionally invested in anything makes it more difficult to admit you're wrong about it and change your mind in the presence of refuting data.

[1] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=munger+on+the+psychology+of+human+m...

[2] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=list+of+logical+fallacies

Re: Node.js has jumped the shark

#90

Post by jbooth »

Tichy wrote: post #81
jbooth wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I'm not a node.js guy, and nothing against it, but being a server-side guy in general, I'll paraphrase a quote that Zed Shaw paraphrased from Chinese Kung Fu novels: "So the intermediate guy is doing all of these backflips and spinning roundhouse kicks and all that, it's very impressive, you couldn't imagine being in that good control of your body. He decides he's pretty good and spars with a master. The master b…

Except that event-driven io is actually the simpler solution compared to threads, isn't it?

Depends. For an application where you have significant CPU work, a simple worker pool (not coded by you), with an accept loop

while (s=accept()) { dispatchToWorkerPool(s) }

And an application-programmer method handleConnection(s) is pretty darned simple. Just do blocking I/O from your threads and rely on the machine to swap in and out appropriately.

For the next level, you can have an evented i/o layer that passes sets of buffers back and forth to your worker pool. That's more complex but still spares application programmers from having to worry about either eventing or threads, they just worry about passing back the right bytes.

Here's where things get interesting, though. It turns out someone studied this (in Java) and actually found that stupidly throwing 1k threads at the problem with blocking i/o performed better than a clever nonblocking server, due to linux 2.6's threading and context-switching improvements.

http://www.mailinator.com/tymaPaulMultithreaded.pdf

Some of that might be specific to Java's integration with linux, but think about it.. the linux guys did a pretty good job at getting the right thread to wake up and assigning it to runnable state. Moving to evented i/o might be the right move for your workflow but it also might make no difference at the cost of some additional complexity.

tl;dr context switching has gotten cheaper/better as linux has improved, 16 CPUs vs 1 CPU changes the math about context switching vs using select(), and worker pool libraries mean you shouldn't actually manage threads yourself.

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