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The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

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Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#81

Post by pmahoney »

karterk wrote: post #74
mtrimpe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anybody tell me what NPM does that e.g. Maven / CPAN / Gems e.a. don't? I haven't seen anything in NPM so far that goes beyond Maven's capabilities so I'm really curious what NPM's big advantage is.

Let's say your application depends on two libraries A and B. And let's say that these 2 libraries depend on different versions of library C. In Maven if library C is not backward compatible, you're stuck. Only one version of library C can exist in the classpath and so one of your 2 libraries might fail. However, in node, library A and B use their corresponding versions of library C. There are no conflicts.

No conflicts, but a tradeoff of loading two versions of library C. I assume at some point, the cost of multiple versions of everything (in terms of memory usage, for example) becomes an issue?

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#83

Post by lmm »

drakaal wrote: post #39

I have never known Node.JS developers to be quiet. Quite the opposite. With a single thread, gaping security holes if you want large memory support, and until about 3 weeks ago nothing that even came close to resembling compliance with HTTP standards, the onlything Node is changing in the OpenSource community is that a crowd that would have been called script kiddies 5 years ago can now put that on a resume and for s…

And yet it succeeds. I think it's simply that async IO is in javascript developers' blood - sure, everything you can do in node you've been able to do for five years with twisted, but if you start trying to do something in twisted all that wonderful python ecosystem is suddenly useless to you, and no-one wants to talk about creating replacements because they've all moved on to tornado or gevent or incompatible-framework-du-jour.

Because javascript started in the single-threaded execution environment of the browser, the whole ecosystem has had to be nonblocking; browser APIs were callback-oriented so the whole ecosystem has been written in callback-oriented fashion, and all the libraries play well with each other. Single-threading is a hair shirt that results in better code in the long run, like laziness in haskell. And async I/O is so much more performant than blocking (in modern application stacks) that that's making node dominate there.

I do wonder whether other languages could have ended up the same way if threading hadn't been invented. Perl always had these unreliable bodged threads, and so there were some really interesting event-driven libraries for it - but the threads were good enough for many practical uses, and AFAIK the ecosystem never converged on a single approach. Did I hear of a PEP attempting to standardise a compatible API for doing these things in python?

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#84

Post by oscargrouch »

RKoutnik wrote: post #73
autarch wrote: post #37

It's hardly surprising that there's a huge burst of growth when a language and its package repository first takes off. I'm sure if we looked at the 4 year periods where each of Perl, Python, and Ruby were hitting their stride we'd see similar numbers. It's nice that node.js is succeeding, but it's hardly changing the face of open source. It's treading a very well-trodden path blazed by Perl starting about 28 years ag…

Looking at the numbers posted in the article, there are almost as many npm packages published in four years of Node than there are Python packages published in 22. I think just saying "hey, they're new, it'll level off" is a great disservice to the Node guys who made this happen. Truth is, npm is growing (in terms of # of packages) faster than any community like this ever .

True but, this may also be a "technology generation" issue.. i mean.. compared with the 90's .. there are much more people interested and with hands-on computer development than ever before..

And this is all about the internet boom.. so it happens that the technology of the moment now is javascript and consequently node.js.. its natural that a great part of this bigger labor force ends up doing node.js stuff..

to see this numbers clearly we need to see the net effect, the number of the whole development community in comparison..

it's not fair to compare 2010's with the 90's.. what was the audience for perl back then? now whats the audience for node.js and all the other players?

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#85

Post by RKoutnik »

oscargrouch wrote: post #84
RKoutnik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the numbers posted in the article, there are almost as many npm packages published in four years of Node than there are Python packages published in 22. I think just saying "hey, they're new, it'll level off" is a great disservice to the Node guys who made this happen. Truth is, npm is growing (in terms of # of packages) faster than any community like this ever .

True but, this may also be a "technology generation" issue.. i mean.. compared with the 90's .. there are much more people interested and with hands-on computer development than ever before.. And this is all about the internet boom.. so it happens that the technology of the moment now is javascript and consequently node.js.. its natural that a great part of this bigger labor force ends up doing node.js stuff.. to see…

There are other factors at play here. Node has access to a bigger audience, but it's an audience that already has mature toys like Python/Perl/etc. Node not only has to create a great ecosystem, it has to create a better one than what already exists (which is the central premise of the article).

Simply saying "Welp, there's more people on the internet now" is ignoring the excellent competition for hackers that Node (or any other new tech with grandiose ambitions) has.

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#86

Post by drakaal »

lmm wrote: post #83
drakaal wrote: post #39

I have never known Node.JS developers to be quiet. Quite the opposite. With a single thread, gaping security holes if you want large memory support, and until about 3 weeks ago nothing that even came close to resembling compliance with HTTP standards, the onlything Node is changing in the OpenSource community is that a crowd that would have been called script kiddies 5 years ago can now put that on a resume and for s…

And yet it succeeds. I think it's simply that async IO is in javascript developers' blood - sure, everything you can do in node you've been able to do for five years with twisted, but if you start trying to do something in twisted all that wonderful python ecosystem is suddenly useless to you, and no-one wants to talk about creating replacements because they've all moved on to tornado or gevent or incompatible-framew…

In web languages threading is often not the win that people think it will be. True web scale is serving 1000s of requests per minute if not second. Each of those users is a "thread" in Python, Java, Etc. So enabling multiple threads per users robs Peter to pay Paul. For this reason the Async model doesn't offer the huge performance gains in deployed code to enterprise scale, that it offers to single users trying to build fast one off projects.

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#87

Post by mayank »

pmahoney wrote: post #81
karterk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say your application depends on two libraries A and B. And let's say that these 2 libraries depend on different versions of library C. In Maven if library C is not backward compatible, you're stuck. Only one version of library C can exist in the classpath and so one of your 2 libraries might fail. However, in node, library A and B use their corresponding versions of library C. There are no conflicts.

No conflicts, but a tradeoff of loading two versions of library C. I assume at some point, the cost of multiple versions of everything (in terms of memory usage, for example) becomes an issue?

That's the tradeoff, with the crux being that adding more memory for a bit of JIT-compiled bytecode is preferable to having an app that just won't work.

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#88

Post by waxjar »

The metric OP uses (total # packages dived by the # years the language exists) is misleading.

Node.js is new, a lot of people are trying to solve a lot of problems that aren't solved yet. Once they're solved and have a more or less standard solution the rate at which new packages are released will drop, simply because most problems will have been solved.

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#89

Post by mayank »

drakaal wrote: post #39

I have never known Node.JS developers to be quiet. Quite the opposite. With a single thread, gaping security holes if you want large memory support, and until about 3 weeks ago nothing that even came close to resembling compliance with HTTP standards, the onlything Node is changing in the OpenSource community is that a crowd that would have been called script kiddies 5 years ago can now put that on a resume and for s…

Perhaps you could enlighten us about these security issues or how any language "plays big data and science". I'm genuinely curious about what you mean by security issues, even though the rest of your comment is bizzarely bitter.

Re: The Node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

#90

Post by jagira »

petercooper wrote: post #69

ruby: 54,385 packages / 18 years = 3022 packages per year Gems / rubygems haven't been around 18 years. The first public release was in 2004. So 9 years or 6042 packages per year is probably more realistic.

And, most of those gems have been written after Rails became prominent (somewhere around 2006/7). Denominator should be 6 or 7.
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