Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things like "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" that sounded profound in its day, but didn't take into account the inexorable march of time. In 2019, there is a strong bias to write Web service applications in the same language as the client. If you're doing greenfield development and do not choose JavaScript as your implementation language, someone will tell you you're being impractical.

View on HN

> In 2019, there is a strong bias to write Web service applications in the same language as the client.

Really? One would have thought that this was true a couple of years ago. Now? Does it really matter which languages your backend is written in, since you are going to interact using APIs anyway? And the backend is going to be composed of containerized microservices, so not even runtime installation is an issue now.

Not sure who in the right mind is still advocating for writing backend code exclusively in NodeJS in 2019.

Not sure who in the right mind is still advocating for writing backend code exclusively in NodeJS in 2019.

Millions of node.js developers? ;)

Also, paypal, netflix, ebay, linkedin, uber,...

Not to mention coding bootcamps. For those with short memories, Java didn't achieve its dominance based on Sun's marketing alone. Sure, that played a role, but Java was also convenient for universities to roll out as a language for instruction, usually displacing the likes of C++ and Pascal. It became the first language for millions of developers, many of whom wouldn't have much exposure to anything else.

For a while, it looked like Python had a shot at becoming the next dominant teaching language. Then the coding bootcamps realized they could save money and retain more students if they pitched JavaScript as the language for client and server. And so millions more developers are emerging with little exposure to anything outside JavaScript.

> the inexorable march of time

I think it's more like pendulum swings. Those biases come and go. The Lisp world is mostly uncorrelated with them.

My pet theory is that each swing is kicked off by a new generation pushing against the previous bias, which by then has been around long enough for its weaknesses to show. It's exciting the first two or three times you go through this, but after a while there's a curious feeling of nothing much ever changing. At that point Lisp looks pretty good again.

I don't think you can be accused of being impractical if your lisp compiles to JavaScript with access to npm

Every Node app I've ever worked on has had a high-ranking team member who advocated for adherence to idiomatic JS, and particularly against the use of functional concepts as expressed by libraries like Sanctuary and Fluture, so as to be readable and maintainable by "ordinary" JS developers (who are apparently assumed to be incapable of learning such concepts).

Lisp -- even transpiled to JS for ingestion by Node -- is patently out of consideration on such a project.

> high-ranking team member

Is there a connection between their opinion and how they came to be high-ranking?

Is it Java Shop Politics[0] at play?

I find their opinion frustrating.

[0] http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/2012/04/13/ja...

Or worse, Typescript.

Nothing but class files, many with one or two public func^H^H^H^H methods in each file, as far as the eye can see :-(

To me, idiomatic JS is FP oriented, but I guess that’s just me. Most of my work has been on the front end, with the Java guys largely staying out of the way, rather than on node.

By 2019, aren't we figuring WASM (besides generated JS) into our prognostications of what tech we'll want to be using?

(JS being considered poor for new work could happen. Look at how quickly even some of the hottest Web frameworks in just the last few years have suddenly become frowned-upon.)

The bias is caused by a glut of junior developers who don't have the experience to feel comfortable using more than one language.

It's one of those ideas that sounds good until you realise the single-language stack you've chosen is based on JavaScript, Node and npm.

> In 2019, there is a strong bias to write Web service applications in the same language as the client.

where is this bias? The majority of enterprise development still happens in Java and C#.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com