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I am working currently as a Senior dev on a team of 8 developers. We use NodeJS6 for the backend and its a great language wot work with. I've never been so productive. There are some drawbacks (weird type system, you need disciplined programmers, etc...) but the overall experience is great. We have a microservice architecture, where every service is on average maybe max 700 lines or so and honestly, Node works great there. You don't have to worry about threads etc.. The event system simplifies all this tremendously. You have millions of library for every flavour. So Microservices in Node are a joy.

I wouldn't do a monolith in Node though... But actually, I'd never do a monolith again :-)

So I definitely don't see it as a joke. Before that I did C#, Clojure, Java, Python, C++ and Ruby jobs and honestly, I think Node is up until now my best experience. In terms of speed, joy and community. The latter is GREAT(!). I love js confs, so much different people, zero hostility, open minded. Great!

Also JS allows you to write very nice code. Look at libraries like Ramda, or the fantasy-land movement. You can write wonderful code in it if you know how to do it. ES6 really helps here. I wouldn't like to write code anymore in ES5 or earlier to be honest...

I have been doing some NodeJS development and it has been pretty miserable compared to something with a real type system.

Lately, I started converting everything over to Typescript and the situation has improved a lot. I think if Typescript becomes the main way that people program JS stuff then Node might have a chance of gaining some mind share.

NodeJS has an advantage on very lean teams where you need a front-end that's not hideous and a backend of some sort, NodeJS makes it easier to find a single person who can do all the programming on that project. It's not a technical win, but it is a business win.

Biggest myth I have ever heared. Only because someone can write frontend JS, doesn't mean he can understand backend logic and actually write proper backend code. Also, if you are a 1-2 person team and using a frontend JS MVC framework in 95% of all cases you are doing it wrong.

I agree. Backend and Software are two different worlds. At least if you want to get both right :-)

But!!! If you have the same language in both, its easier to check the code of the over side and derive some insights, or to eventually fix some small bug somewhere or implement a minor feature.

I experience that currently.

Not all projects require "proper backend code" whatever that means. It's not my team, but our enterprise/analytics dashboard is written in Node; we've been fine with 2 developers on that team for 3 years. It doesn't receive a tonne of traffic since it's largely just interactive reports for our users and the actually complicated parts are handled by a separate team that makes sure the relevant data lives in a Druid database that the dashboard team can query.

The whole product started as a NodeJS+MongoDB app, which was a disaster at scaling to the billions of requests a day we handle and we've replaced it everywhere except the dashboard, but there is absolutely no incentive for replacing it there and when something truly tricky comes up there is support in the rest of the org for them; of course nothing stops them from writing a hair ball besides themselves, but that's always the case.

You don't necessarily need to find someone who is only good at frontend code and throw them into a backend project, but if you find someone comfortable with Node, they're probably in that position because they also know how to do frontend, and once you have at least one senior Node developer, you can teach your frontend-only developers.

Maybe I just don't have a good sense for the web developer market and there are a lot of backend+frontend people who are not Node developers, but my intuition tells me that's not the case.

"if you are a 1-2 person team and using a frontend JS MVC framework in 95% of all cases you are doing it wrong."

You're saying having a small team makes it a bad idea to use a standard-ish library for organizing things and avoiding grunt work?

I would argue the exact opposite.

The killer feature (and only reason I use it) is being able to render the same templates with the same data on the server (isomorphic/universal/whatever).

The result is a webpage that can do lightening-fast transitions client-side without breaking the back button.

For what it's worth, ReactJS.NET does server side rendering, so you can have a .NET backend.

https://reactjs.net/guides/server-side-rendering.html

In most cases, it's probably still easier to use C#, but JScript has always been an option in ASP.Net (and classic ASP). I found that the ability to use the same code on the back-end and front-end was nice when you needed it, but those occasions were quite rare.

The code also usually required some (often significant) refactoring of the code in question to make it portable between the front-end and back-end environments. In classic ASP, this usually meant ensuring front-end code moving to the back-end was isolated from any DOM interaction and didn't use any ES5(+) features, while back-end code moving to the front-end had to be isolated from the ASP objects (Application, Server, Session, etc.). It's all stuff that seems like common sense, but wasn't rigorously applied to JScript code which only had to work on IE5 (later 6, finally 7 before the project was put out to pasture), especially since use of JavaScript on the client wasn't significant until the project's last couple of years.

IronES2015 or IronTypeScript. Interesting thought.

That part of the web workflow just doesn't seem big enough to warrant all the other parts that are missing in the NodeJS ecosystem. In practice if those things are important enough there's a variety of template languages that are ubiquitous.

so you have to keep the same code on client side for every page that requires re-rendering. kind of bloated?

Hm? Other languages also have template systems. PHP actually started as template system. Even today it should be possible to do inline templating stuff just with PHP (although other template languages are easier to use for that purpose). Not a huge fan of PHP either, but templating is not a killer feature. Everybody has that.

nodes killer feature is the (accidently) combination of good practises. And the commonjs lexical scoped module system

> combination of good practises

Other languages have that as well, although probably not the same good practices.

> commonjs lexical scoped module system

Fast googling of commonjs results in it being some kind of standard library? Not really sure what this is. Can you explain more in depth?

Node uses JavaScript witch is a simple scripting language that is event based, asynchronous, and thread safe.

In JavaScript there are values: 42, "hello", true. And objects: [list], {object}, function. And if statements ... While more stuff exists there is a consensus in the JavaScript community that they should be avoided, so you rarely see the bad parts. Then there are only a handfull of built in JavaScript functions. And there is no concept of stack, pointers or types. How the data is represented in binary vary and is very optimized.

A node script is usually a bunch of functions that are called by IO events, like a IP socket connection or callbacks from data streams, like when a buffer is filled.

Node has no standard library, just a bunch of built in modules, that are required like any other module. And Node does NOT support imports, includes, or global variables, instead you require Modules. And since modules are lexically/function/block scoped, they can only be called from within the function from where you required them. You never have to look elsewhere to see where a variable is declared, or search for places where it's used, like in many other programming languages.

Here's an example how a NodeJS script can look like:

  var socket = require("socket");
  socket.onConnection = function socketConnection(client) {
    client.onData = function dataReceived(message) {
       var sms = require("sms");
       sms.send(message);
       client.send("SMS message sent");
    }
  }

Besides lexical scoped modules in the example above there is also a "closure" of client in dataReceived from when socketConnection was called.