Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js

mappingthejourney.com

1 point·tim_sw··3 comments

"... if you’re building a server, I can’t imagine using anything other than Go... I think Node is not the best system to build a massive server web. I would use Go for that. And honestly, that’s the reason why I left Node. It was the realization that: oh, actually, this is not the best server-side system ever."

I think there's the right tool for the right job, and that differs from person to person. Not every application needs an elegant concurrency model, and not every developer is ready to burdened with pointer management.

I think this is why Rails still exists, even after all the bad press it received after Twitter moved away from it [1].

Node is a great stepping stone for newer developers to get exposure to software development without having to learn a complex framework, .NET for example. It's an incredibly flexible language where you can embrace functional or object oriented programming.

Javascript can be a quagmire of a language at times, but once you learn to properly wield it -- it becomes somewhat endearing. A butter knife that will easily cut a steak, if you will.

[1] - https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2011/twitter-se...

Lots of respect for Ryan. His ideas brought about major changes (for the better IMO) in both front-end and backend development.

It's hard to imagine a world without all of the tooling and frameworks that Node has brought about, even if has added an extra layer of complexity -- i.e. webpack.

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