Hacker News Reader

Comment by illicium | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the author got upset that he needed to learn a platform in order to use it.

Another issue is that JavaScript doesn't really lend itself to continuation passing style, leading to ugly nested callbacks. There are many libraries that make this more manageable, like async: https://github.com/caolan/async

View on HN

I'm upset because I invested a substantial amount of time without really reaping much of a reward (other than knowing to avoid it). I'm upset because there's a lot of unreasonable hype.

I find that stretching my head around a new and different paradigm is it's own reward. Everyone's different and has different goals.

If your goal is to implement dynamic web content as productively as possible, no one will fault you for sticking with what you already know and are comfortable with. But it's not valid to conclude that everything else is terrible if it doesn't improve the type of things that you do.

Personally, I've lost count of the number of times I'd wished a blocking API call was instead non-blocking. Do a survey of how many desktop Windows applications are able to exit gracefully while a File->Open dialog box is still open.

Stretching my head around functional programming was rewarding. Stretching my head around lisp was rewarding. Stretching my heard around continuation[1] passing style was rewarding.

Stretching my head around everything-is-async was not rewarding. Just because it's different, doesn't mean it's good.

[1]: http://community.schemewiki.org/?call-with-current-continuat...

I agree that FP, Lisp, and CPS are rewarding. I find async IO very appealing because so very often I've had to implement imperfect workarounds when it wasn't available.

But I still feel really conflicted about Javascript.

> without really reaping much of a reward

So because you were unable to figure it out, no one else will ever have success with it?

> unreasonable hype

Welcome to the real world. Not everything that deserves accolades gets them. The things that are successful- they don't necessarily deserve it. Just look at top-40 music.

So anyway, your post is against the attention the framework has gotten, not the framework itself?

> Welcome to the real world

It was hyped here in HN, a community which should (in theory) have a very strong BS filter. So it's very natural that most people here would think that this hype is perfectly reasonable.

If it was hyped by some corporate giant like Oracle or Microsoft, I would probably scorn at it from the start.

Awesome, thanks for the link.

I'd been experimenting with Node.js the other day and ended up reimplementing that 'async.series([...])' function.

Node-lazy is another module that looks very useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com