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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately yes, but I'm not surprised.

There seem to be a large number of people who came into the tech-startup industry through programming a bit of Javascript, maybe from a web design background, who never had a formal education in computer science, who suddenly found out that they could write 'full' web apps in Javascript, and they could query a database in Javascript, but never learnt enough to know why this is a bad idea.

I'm not saying this is all bad, or that all Node devs are bad at all. Node is a good tool for a certain set of problems, and there are some excellent tools in the ecosystem and some great devs. But I think it is the easiest ecosystem to be a terrible developer in, and still get stuff working.

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What does Mongo have to do with Javascript, and why is querying a DB with javascript a bad idea? What language you query a DB in should have no impact.

MongoDB isn't really "queried with Javascript". Rather, it's "queried with JSON", which is a separate language entirely.

MongoDB is bad because it has unsafe defaults (e.g., acknowledging writes that haven't happened), not because you can query it in JavaScript.

While I agree with most of your assessment, this is one bit I very much disagree with:

> But I think it is the easiest ecosystem to be a terrible developer in, and still get stuff working.

That honour would go to PHP, as far as I'm concerned. JS has many more fail-hard scenarios, and if you don't adapt your attitude to learn about things before using them, you're very quickly going to run into brick walls due to the entire callback thing.

Neither really has anything to do with MongoDB either - there's nothing inherently JS-y about MongoDB (JSON isn't JS), it just happens to have picked up a lot of traction around those parts.

To the comments that pointed out that JS and MongoDB aren't related, I'd argue they are, if only because the communities have related them.

The "MEAN" stack exists, MongoDB is popular in the JS community, and I feel they both exhibit many of the same hints of a fundamental lack of understanding about tools from a significant number of users.

As I said, there are great JS devs, and I'm sure there are some people using MongoDB for the 'right' things, but I don't think it's the majority.

Seems like you are saying Node is the new PHP or Ruby/Rails. It definitely has the most traction/gains so it has many experienced but also many newer devs.

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