Ryan Dahl (Creator of Node.js) is doing an IAMA on Reddit

> If I were more mean spirited I might say that you don't understand how to parse a sentence or that words can take on different meanings in different contexts. I'm certain that's not actually true but that is effectively the conclusion you came to in the same situation. Pretty silly right?

Ahh so let's just play word games then? Let's just call callbacks "allocators of effect" and functions "parameterized callbacks" and see how clear our writing is. Even if we ignore this gaffe, it implies Ryah thinks the world is struggling under the burden of blocking libraries. "Oh no," our hypothetical wage slave might cry, "this library unexpected uses a thread. Now my job is impossible." It's strange to even claim that a feature in 2011. Maybe Node's needs a Paul-Tyma-figure to come snap them out of their implicit assumption that asynchronous libraries are always faster; they are not.

But what he said wasn't true. You can write loops in Javascript, so libraries could enter into infinite loops which would stop the machine from progressing.

> Whether or not winning benchmarks is useful is debatable, but given that constraint it's obvious you don't want GC. He wants a scripting language without GC not JavaScript specifically.

He was not asking or direct allocators and deallocators, if you read the quote, he was talking about removing memory management entirely. I'm not sure how Node's functions could lexically close over anything unless you start introducing a lot of new notions that current node programmers don't care abut.

> Give the guy some credit, he is a C programmer by trade.

I want to. I really want to. But then he writes blog posts like this (http://antirobotrobot.tumblr.com/post/5109182039/overlapped-...) and severely undermines my confidence in him. When he was just playing around with a side project I thought it was a cool hack. Now that he's got a corporate backer it's a little surprising he isn't bothering to up his game.

> He said: "purity of non-blocking libraries" which has nothing to do with purity in the functional sense of the word

I'm sorry, but the word is bizarrely used here. I challenge you to find a single use of this word in this sense in the literature of our profession. I'd be surprised if you could. If he had not used that word, the sentance would have been clearer.

And it's not even true. A library could contain an infinite loop, which will do what blocking does.

> Huh? Why? How can anything not allow manual memory management?

Languages with closures and callbacks have a pretty damn hard time with explicit memory managment. And please note that he didn't say he wanted some explicit memory management features, he said he wished Javascript didn't have garbage collection (like C). This isn't, "I sure do wish I could manage some buffers."

> Very vague statements from his side; how can you claim he don't understand how it works?

Because Akka's and Erlang's dispatch model is inimical to the way Node.js does business.

It is not your fault. Thanks a lot for posting that

Not to be pedantic, but I saw AMAs on 4chan long before I saw them on reddit.