The History of Node.js | Hacker News Reader

The History of Node.js

elegantcode.com

106 pointsturingbook13 comments

Node.js is a great project and is making popular good things, but there is some disinformation in this blog post. For instance Tcl has had this idea of an http server that is an event based library for at least 10 years.

Not just tclhttpd, I mean, event programming in Tcl is central and there was a library called 'http' that exported a web server where you could bind urls to Tcl functions serving them.

> there is some disinformation in this blog post. For instance Tcl has had this idea of an http server that is an event based library for at least 10 years.

I think it was quite clear that he spoke of his personal change in thinking about what a web server was.

> The best thing about javascript on the server is that no one had used it

AppJet and Jaxer were around way before, as well as JSDB, haXe/JS, jslibs, Narwhal... that should read "no one had succeeded before".

Active Server Pages could be written in JScript (Microsoft's variation of JavaScript), and they even grew that into JScript.NET.

Didn't JavaScript start as Netscape's LiveScript intended to run on the Netscape web server? So more like it is coming full circle.

edit: random link sort of supporting what I thought I remembered http://www.findmeat.org/tutorials/javascript/x486110.htm

Yes! I remember waaaay back then thinking about starting a company that would develop a client side scrpting language like Visual Basic. But then Netscape started talking about LiveScript and I figured they'd be too hard to displace.

The point here was that there weren't a huge number of standard libraries (for networking, IO, etc) that almost certainly would have been written in a blocking style.

With no legacy libraries to worry about, he could build a system entirely around non-blocking IO.

> (Ruby is f*cked because it can only run on one thread)

Also, surprisingly enough, Javascript.

Hilariously, while it's true about JavaScript, it is not true about Ruby.

Maybe they were referring to the MRI/YARV GVL? (even so, their claim is still not technically correct)

I really enjoyed listening to this and it was especially helpful for me as somebody transitioning out of an academic environment like Ryan did before starting node.

There is this really great (German language) podcast about node.js from a well known podcaster here Tim Pritlove: http://cre.fm/cre167 - I listened to it and I know I had to try out node.js (which I did).

Can you write a blog on its content？

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