Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

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You know what isn't as quick? Websockets, non-trivial asynchronous code, boilerplate, and build times. The vast majority of my company is built on Java and we're not encumbered by legacy code, so we get to play with all the new stuff. I don't need to be convinced that Java (or even more specifically the JVM) is a good choice for many practical reasons. I live in IntelliJ and Gradle (and Maven too) all day, you're preaching to the choir.

Between having a REPL, near instaneous stop/relaunch times, and doing in 8 lines of Node.js what takes me 70 lines using CompletableFutures, I'm still going to reach for Node to prove the idea.

Now, when it takes hold and looks like it might stick around, it immediately gets turned into a Java project. Or, if the event we were building for is over, it basically just gets deleted- which pretty much says it all in my opinion.

It's not a toy language, there's some real usefulness to it, but just like anything else, there's a time and place. Currently, that place is NOT production.

I agree that Java's async support is bad (haven't had to use it much since I've been primarily Scala for years now), but I'm surprised a PoC would need to be async in the first place? Conventional one-thread-per-request is fine for non-prod, no?

A lot of projects my team did at my last company were of the "You've got 2 or 3 weeks to build this awesome thing for a launch event that will have a crushing wave of usage for about 3-7 days".

It was really fun work, because even the 'simple' stuff we built had to address some of the big traffic issues you'd normally have at a much larger scale and the work was usually very high concept or cutting edge. It would've been a nightmare to maintain for longer than a week though.

I'm surprised that you consider it controversial that a highly dynamic language can be considered fast to PoC something in than Java. There is just less typing/code that needs to be defined (I know IDEs help). Also easier to do quick and dirty stuff that I imagine would be more restricted in Java. No classes to define, just throw your values in there.

I prefer python in general but for zero-to-simple-web-endpoint I may pick Node.

> I'm surprised that you consider it controversial that a highly dynamic language can be considered fast to PoC something in than Java.

Sure, but that wasn't the argument; GP talked specifically about async and websockets, which are areas where Java is particularly weak, but areas that I was surprised would be required for a PoC at all.

Fair enough. I was mostly responding to the thread of discussion overall. I realise now that I was probably reacting more to the viewpoint of hota_mazi.

Do you have any particular reasons to prefer Node (assuming Javascript) to Clojure/Groovy?

Asking, because I do most of my development in Clojure and find it much nicer than Node both for POC and production. There's also self-hosted Clojurescript now that runs without a dependency on JVM.

Honestly, because I'm pretty good w/ Node (or just JS in general) and haven't invested the time to get good w/ Groovy or Clojure at this point.

I've only just played around with Clojure and I've written a middling amount of Groovy, but the vast majority of it involved Jenkins build pipelines, so I don't really count it.

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