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Comment by gfosco | Hacker News Reader

Basically they switched for... personal opinion. That's all I can really gleam from the post. You can do it all in Node JS, they just didn't want to.

Screw all the frameworks, I am working with bare-metal Node and loving every minute.

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"You can do it all in Node JS"

People like you scare the shit out of me. Golden Hammer is a new concept to you, isn't it?

He actually did lay out the reasons, but your religious zealotry won't let you see it because someone isn't loving your sacred choice of technology.

Lol.. They don't have to love it. They also don't have to write a blog post explaining why they stopped using it.

It was done to generate press, because really no one here ever heard of their app before this. They gained, by slighting Node, and that's why I commented.

definitely agree with this. I can understand why 37signals use RoR, because they built it and know it inside out. But for a newcomer diving into rails now is difficult because the ecosystem is so huge it's hard to navigate, and everything is so integrated and you usually end up bundling a ton of thin that you don't need. With node everything is modularized, it is much more easier to understand what's happening under the hood, and streams are freakin awesome.

Completely agree. I tried to learn rails and gave up partly for this reason. I have been using node for a while now and LOVE it! I really dont understand why people bash node.

In my experience, few people spend much time dissecting technical reasons why node sucks, and most of those people who do don't understand it.

Loads of people laugh at the people who reply to virtually every post with "I use node and LOVE it!", but that's to be expected with any case of over-ebullient advocacy.

I disagree with this. By the ecosystem being huge do you mean the modules and different gems? That in itself is modularized for having the choice not to use them. The availability is what makes it powerful on top of the simplicity to get it all running.

Node is by far not simple for a new developer or new teams running node. Projects tend to drift toward unreadable due to poor design, just try following people's callbacks. I am not saying this is Node's fault but it being young results in developers' lack of experience.

Im sorry but you make it sound like everybody that does rails is a perfect programmer. Rails itself has changed over the years and if you look at an app from years ago im quite sure it will be very different then a current rails app. So again this is just not an appropriate comparison.

I don't think they are perfect programmers. Heck, I use several languages and frameworks, whatever is right for the project. Knowing a language isn't a perfect programmer (we all know that). And to your point, that was the comparison I would make. Node is young so there is a lack of experience with it.

npm is vastly better than the gem package manager imo, making using modules infinitely easier. Furthermore, node modules (the good ones) do one thing and do it right. What I like about node is they give you the core without which you can't live, and you add the layers you want. With RoR you get a huge onion and need to peel a bunch of layers and add others if you want to do things right. I didn't say node was for beginners though. But say for a programmer with a good theoretical background but no web development experience, node is much more appealing and usable.

Do you think Node will be lean and mean forever. It's been around for about two years. Let it grow and it will soon become just as "fat" as Rails and Java frameworks. Funny thing about people reinventing the wheel thinking their approach is just so much smarter. In the end you end up having to face the very same problems Rails guys and Java guys faced in the past. Abstractions, reusable components for X, Y and Z and you end up with something like J2EE or Rails.

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