Hacker News Reader

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Arthur C. Clarke.

For an user of a product/service, this is bliss. For a hacker, it might get tricky. Now, considering the fact that this is all open source, the huge wall you’re talking about is just a matter of perception. You’re free to debug and go with it as low level as you need.

View on HN

Easier said than done. The code of Rails was also publicly available, but getting from a hello world app to diving into a hard core codebase such as that of Rails is a huge step. Understanding framework code is quite different from understanding app code as well.

I agree. I didn’t say it would be easy, though. ☺ In fact, understanding “magic” is bloody difficult. It it weren’t so, then it wouldn’t be “magic”.

It’s also worth observing that Meteor is not presented as a “framework”. The comparison with Rails was introduced here, on HN. They say it’s “a set of new technologies”. I guess this implies loose coupling, which is a healthy paradigm when applied to components/modules/objects of a development ecosystem.

If only Meteor were nothing more than a proof of concept, it would still be mind-blowing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com