Hacker News Reader

Comment by forty | Hacker News Reader

> nobody is forced to use new libraries only because they use JavaScript.

It's not completely true IMO for 2 reasons: 1- the nodejs standard lib is quite poor compared to say, Java's, Scala's or python's, so you generally need quite a lot of modules to do anything 2- the npm ecosystem is much more amateur. To do anything you have a ton of poorly supported by hobbyists or not supported at all modules. This can force you to change modules/libs regularly. This is to be compared to the Java ecosystem for example, were more people are working together to build well supported/high quality libs (Apache libraries for example)

View on HN

Exactly, it is impossible to use a stable long term Linux distribution and node, most packages force you to get the latest or before latest version of node.

Other issue is that things move fast and break, you are not sure that 3 months old tutorial will work in present.

Edit: I know I can and I did grabbed node and npm outside the repositories, but you do not see this issue with other languages where I must install latest stuff to get most libraries working.

Also, your average npm module packages incredibly small amounts of functionality, making dependency trees huge and hence also very brittle.

This is why many of us do the sane thing and leave JavaScript to the browser, while enjoying server side rendering with a bit of dynamism.

Yeah but on Node.js, Express has been the de facto framework of choice for building REST APIs for over 6 years. The JS fatigue phenomenon was mostly on the front end, and even that has basically settled down as people have rallied around React, Angular and Vue.

Not for our customers that keep happily using solutions based on Java and .NET platforms.

You must be joking. I never heard of Express and we have put several REST APIs into production in several companies.

Uh, what?

It might've become the defacto standard for consuming them, but definitely not for creating them.

Almost no service I've ever administered used a nodejs backend.

He never said anything about node being prevalent, only that Express was within node.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com