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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Looks really interesting, I love goal 1: no JavaScript - YES! Thank you! And elixir is a very exciting language, especially to an ops person where when I read elixir code it actually makes sense to me and seems elegant. Ignoring my technical praise the objective of the product is solid, this is something I've been interested in for a while, I have a solution for usenet but not so much for torrents.

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Absolutetly. +1 for the "no javascript" goal.

I'm so sick of 'designers' thinking they're programmers and smashing out some NodeJS or JavaScript heavy crap with no regards to performance or security. Elixir seems to attract some smart minds that think 'big picture' - obviously I'm generalising here and I'm not stating that this particular project is brilliant or anything but it is a trend I've observed.

NodeJS is a dependency in the usage instructions for Debian 7 and CentOS.

Ew, what for?

The creators of Phoenix didn't want to write their own code to manage Javascript and CSS (e.g. rewriting the Rails "asset pipeline" in Elixir), so they just integrated Brunch [1], which is built on Node.js and NPM. I think this was an excellent decision. (Node.js is only needed during development and deployment of your assets. It is not used in production.)

[1] http://brunch.io

That is still pretty awful imo - think quite a few of the people considering Elixir and Phoenix are doing so explicitly to get away from having to Node.js close to their computers in the first place.

I personally don't consider it a problem if I don't personally have to touch it. Phoenix does that reasonably well.

I don't see the problem. Why not use Javascript toolkits to package, and develop in Javascript?

I can understand languages not self-hosting their compilers, but I'd at least like it to self-host its toolkits---bundlers, packers, preprocessors, etc.

It's not needed, thankfully:

https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo/issues/30

This project is using Phoenix. Nodejs is an optional dependency to compile static assets like CSS etc. It's not actually required to write applications using Phoenix.

the team removed all the javascript overnight

+1 indeed, the unnecessary use of javascript everywhere is making the Internet unusable to people with slow connections and computers (possibly 1 billion worldwide) and security conscious users (e.g. Tor browser users)

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