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Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

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kowdermeister

So how do you explain Node.js being so popular?

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Because frontend devs migrated to the backend and didn't want to learn a better language.

And those of us who went to it from those ostensibly "better" languages...?

Go on. Say we're "wrong". I could use a chuckle. :)

Not wanting to use those better languages is effectively the same in this case. But you mentioned it being wrong first...

Because I'm rather tired of the silly claims. I write Rust. I write Kotlin. I write C++. I write Ruby. And I also write JavaScript. Horses for courses--and the mind-meltingly stupid sneering nonsense should just end. Just...end.

I used to smarm about it. I was wrong to. You should stop, because you are wrong now.

> Because I'm rather tired of the silly claims. I write Rust. I write Kotlin. I write C++. I write Ruby. And I also write JavaScript.

I never made any such 'claims', but I'm happy for you. I enjoy those things, too...

> and the mind-meltingly stupid sneering nonsense should just end. Just...end. I used to smarm about it. I was wrong to.

You're the one sneering, smarming, etc. and attempting to create drama. I never said anything about using Node being bad. Maybe you should re-read what I wrote?

> You should stop, because you are wrong now.

Hey, keep believing that if it makes you feel better.

What about, we need to pimp up our CVs for HR department drone filters?

Suggesting tha Node is only used by lazy front-end developers does nothing but show how condescending and uncharitable you are towards other people who picked different trade-offs than you.

Not wanting to learn a different language is a justifiable preference. Software is full of cost/benefit questions like that. Believing true things also doesn't make you uncharitable.

Ryan Dahl wanted to replicate the nginx "async" model for normal web development. Since javascript was single-threaded, it pretty much forced an asynchronous programming model and many of the libraries were already built that way, so it proved to be a fertile ground for experimentation.

In other words, we have node.js and not node.xxx because other languages at that time did not provide a suitable ecosystem for building asynchronous programs. Today most languages have much better async support, or they have features (like goroutines in golang) which achieve the same objective in a different way.

Emphasis on ecosystem. I remember working with netty and other platforms that provided async networking years before nodejs got popular and asnyc became "trendy".

Doug Schmidt's C++ Reactor and Sam Rushings Python Medusa did async networking 20 years ago. But in the late 90s and early 2000s a lot of J2EE based server code was built in Java that used one blocking thread per client; that was a major wrong turn in mainstream SW design that took a long time to correct, IMHO.

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