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Comment by wicknicks | Hacker News Reader

"The problem I have is processing a lot of data quickly"

It seems that the author needs something like super performant Hadoop++. Node doesn't address these problems.

"Node enthusiasts are front-end coders not wanting to do server coding"

I think he missed the point there. Using Javascript as a server side language, node has bridged a gap so many web programmers have been crossing. With node and mongodb, JSON is a language native to the entire webstack -- which is a very powerful idea. We are able to sync datastructures across server and client now.

This rant sounds very similar to "NoSQL DBs will never reach the competence and performance of the RDBMS".

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> With node and mongodb, JSON is a language native to the entire webstack -- which is a very powerful idea. We are able to sync datastructures across server and client now.

Honest question here -- outside of not calling input and output transforms to or from JSON and native array/list/whatever, what is the new ability and the powerful idea? Aren't the two transforms pretty insignificant in practice?

Agreed. But even "not calling input and output transforms" is incorrect. JSON, just like XML or the next thing we will come up with, has to be parsed to be any use. This may happen under the hood but this is still happening.

I guess what mikescar finds attractive is the illusion that things are "integrated" and talking to each other in a format that doesn't look like one (it seems to be part of the programming language).

"""This rant sounds very similar to "NoSQL DBs will never reach the competence and performance of the RDBMS"."""

Well, performance wise NoSQL DBs are faster. In anybody doubting that?

As for the competence part, well SQL DBs (by which I don't mean MySQL) are based on a little something called Relational Algebra. Which is math. Which is a (formally) proven and coherent set of methods for data representation and querying.

NoSQL DBs are just ad hoc solutions.

Not the same thing.

You have solved a problem that didn't exist -- XML and HTML were both reasonable linguafrancas prior to JSON's invention.

JavaScript as a server-side langauge is not a good thing; JavaScript is not a good systems language. We've already had an era of a poor systems language (PHP) being predominant in the web application space, and the conclusion was that there are better languages which can more effectively represent both general systems tasks, and specialized web tasks.

NoSQL databases will never be relational DBs because they explicitly eschew the relational algebra that powers the latter. Similarly, Node isn't a serious server-side solution explicitly because of its reliance on JavaScript.

Finally, I should point out that JSON isn't a subset of JavaScript. This means that you can't exec it as JavaScript in all cases, and even if you could, exec/eval is massively dangerous and should be avoided. This means that you're parsing JSON, which means that you no longer have an advantage over other languages -- Perl, Python, and Ruby all have very strong JSON support. (Python even has it in its standard library now.)

Regarding Javascript, I think it suits well the async paradigm because that's how people expect Javascript to be.

Why isn't Javascript a good server-side language?

I agree that js does support the async paradigm for the reason you mentioned; however, at the risk of sounding like I'm speaking for the op js would not be my first choice for system or server side programming. The simple reason being that javascript's behavior is often near inexplicable, many examples can be found here: http://wtfjs.com. I'm tolerant of that strangeness while manipulating the DOM but really only because there are no other choices.

Every language has it's own WTFs. Many of the ones in Javascript are shared with Ruby, Python and other interpreted languages. They hardly bite anyone in a real project.

If by real you mean yours fine; however, your projects are not everyone's. If you'd like you could respond with specific cases you've used javascript for system or server level programming.

What part of JSON isn't a subset of JavaScript?

"JSON is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript. Since JSON is a subset of JavaScript, it can be used in the language with no muss or fuss." http://www.json.org/js.html

http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset

Also see my other reply.

- XML and HTML are good ways to structure data...sometimes. Other times, they're godawful. Especially if you're trying to pass data from one piece of code to another piece of code in order to do RPC-like things (server->client, for example). There's a reason that JSON is popular, and it's not because "it's the cool thing to do".

- JSON is a strict subset of Javascript syntax. You can always eval() a JSON string to convert it (not that you should). Many browsers support native JSON parsing now, so it's also very fast. I'm not sure what the downside is there.

http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset

JSON isn't a strict subset of JS. Moreover, no, you should never eval() things which are untrusted. Do you really trust everything the browser tells you? No? Then why trust JSON?

I'm not anti-JSON, I'm anti-JS. Browsers don't support other languages (except for VB, which bites, and Fx nightly support for Python, which I wish would become more widespread) so there's no choice in a browser. On the server side, though, you have a chance to use real languages, so you really should.

Oh, and also, you do know that XML-RPC, bless its ill-specified heart, is still around, right? There's a whole world of enterprise that isn't prepared to accept JSON-RPC.

...I understand that eval() is dangerous. As noted in my comment.

Anyway, what do you count as a "real language"? I assume you mean Java. Which is...fine. But Java is not the answer for everyone.

Java, C, C++, Haskell, Python, Perl, Ruby, C#, Go, Scala, and Clojure are all better languages for systems development. (In no particular order.)

No love for OCaml and Erlang?

If JavaScript is such junk why hasn't any other language displaced it?

s/PHP/JavaScript/g in any other conversation about PHP; the same reasons all apply, including ease of learning curve, deployment inertia, etc. There's a massive amount of parallel community and language development between PHP and JS, and I feel that it's worth pointing out.

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