Hacker News Reader

Comment by pencilhappen | Hacker News Reader

> Each language has special strengths and weaknesses, there is no silver bullet that excels at everything. Go, C/C++, Lua, Ruby, Perl, Scala, Node.js, Python... each of these are THE best choice for certain classes of problems (and terrible for others).

Not quite true... not all languages have a sweet spot in a production environment. Node.js isn't particularly excellent at anything, the attraction is mainly "I know JS, and I don't want to learn anything else right now", which is a terrible attitude for someone who wants to have a career in tech. Knowing more than one tool in the toolbox is a key skill, since there is no one-size-fits-all.

Jury is still out on Scala. It's a big language, but unclear if there's a production sweet spot or not compared to other JVM hosted languages.

The rest of the ones you listed have their definite sweet spots. There are tons of languages though, and most don't have one.

View on HN

> Node.js isn't particularly excellent at anything

That's not very kind. Yes it has its flaws but it's not bad at being a higher abstraction over async-everything, augmented with a huge module repository. Support for isomorphic javascript can come in handy for some applications.

I've never done Scala but my understanding of it is that it could be a good fit for modelling certain types of business logic while being able to take advantage of exiting java libs out there.

> Knowing more than one tool in the toolbox is a key skill, since there is no one-size-fits-all.

Yes, we agree here. That was the point I was making.

Node is adequate at async, but not excellent. As I said in a sibling comment, things that are synchronous still, like GC, make it fall down at scale. Isomorphic JS isn't that useful in most real situations.

My point about Scala is that there doesn't seem to be a clear cut niche that it excels at. There are numerous other non-Java languages that run on the JVM that could be in the running, and they all get to take advantages of the whole Java ecosystem too.

Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, and (maybe) Lua aren't amazing at handling async operations like Node.JS can.

Go is, in many respects, a great replacement for Python and Node in that it's simple and handles concurrency well. Scala and other JVM languages fall here too, but come with their assoc complexity.

Python, Node, and Ruby have tons of battle-tested code which often makes the language the "strongest" if for nothing else than there is code that works and it's not critical enough we rewrite it ourselves.

There are definitely sweet spots for each of these languages.

Node isn't great at async, despite the hype. Important things are still synchronous, most notably the GC, so you can very easily wind up with service stalls at scale. The module churn in Node land means that few things are actually battle tested.

BEAM languages are the sweet spot for concurrency right now.

I had a manager that loved Java. He wanted to add a new helper service onto an existing service that was written in Python, but the new service would be Java (because Java is the best, obviously).

This new helper was responsible for transforming, combining, and synthesizing large API responses with somewhat variable and highly nested data structures into other large API responses with somewhat variable and highly nested data structures. It certainly was not Java I was proud of, but it would have been trivial (and FAR more readable) in Python. Ugh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com