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vogonj

to expand upon this, here are some other representative Ted Dziuba posts:

http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

http://teddziuba.com/2011/02/the-case-against-queues.html

http://teddziuba.com/2011/03/osx-unsuitable-web-development....

http://teddziuba.com/2008/09/a-web-os-are-you-dense.html

if I had to sum up his philosophy in three sentences, here they are:

your job is software engineering. every bit of fancy shiny stuff that you add onto your software is another thing that can break. the most important decision you need to make in your job is determining when your tools are good enough and don't need further elaboration -- at a certain point you need to stop jerking off about your toolchain, and just ship your project.

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Yeah, some of those blog posts don't make much sense. The queues article, for example. RabitMQ and ActiveMQ are big Java things to keep your sysadmins up at night. ZeroMQ is just a networking library. Yes, they all end in "MQ", but at the end of the day, everything in computing as a message queue. If you don't like it, go back to typewriters :)

Fine. So you pick your tool (Java, Python, Node.js, presumably with an Nginx or Apache front end, though I'm not sure you want to put Node behind Apache), and use it.

I don't see how Node.js isn't a valid tool. Async can be a bit of an over-optimization, but you don't have to use it (even in Node), as Ted's naive Fib server shows. And Javascript is ugly as sin. But so's PHP, the language behind Wikipedia, and you have to use JS (or something like Coffee-script) anyway.

I don't know enough about Node to really judge it, but there's nothing I've heard in this whole flame-war that really rules it out.

agreed -- for what it's worth, I've looked into node.js for some of my projects, then thrown it out because I already know other technologies which serve the same purpose. the problem isn't with the technology, the problem is with the marketing (and that includes grass-roots marketing through engineers who swear by the technology as one-size-fits-all.)

Any decent troll needs a nugget of truth at the bottom to hook people in.

It is an old question 'How do we tell truths that might hurt?'.

If you try the well reasoned analysis, you get passed over. It turns out that no-one pays attention unless there is a fight happening (c.f. tech crunch's reporting style)

'If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you.'

The morale is - everyone admonishes a flame, but nothing else gathers posts quite like it. If you think something is terrible, holding back will get you nowhere.

I like you.

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