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Comment by themanr | Hacker News Reader

A great thing about the web is that a multitude of server side languages can be used. While I don't ever want to have to write the same template twice, having everything converge on nothing but Javascript doesn't seem like a very inspiring future to me.

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I whole heartedly agree and lately I've been getting worried that too many people in the web community are onboard with a node-centric view of the browser...

It may the same language, but the runtimes are completely different and have incredibly different use cases and environments. Not only that but I'd rather have a healthy ecosystem where the Unix runtime, .NET runtime, JVM runtime, and even interpretive runtimes that are built on top of those runtimes likes Ruby, Python and JavaScript are all considered equally!

That is closer in line to what the real definition of isomorphism is describing. :)

If you are building a service or API, then you can do that in whatever language you like. The natural language for writing client side apps is JS (ok, the only language, for now).

Correct. If you're already writing a bunch of JavaScript for the client-side, then just think about this approach as migrating some of that client, UI logic to the server.

but who writes clientside logic before serverside logic ?

Front-end developers.

Frankly, Node is a way for front-end developers to write server-side code without having to learn too much new stuff.

Yet they keep marketing it as a future for all developers. Thank you, but no, thank you.

No. Any thick client architecture has to deal with this problem. The current resource-oriented models (by which I mean they're focused on serving http resources) are severely limiting those of us who want to develop a web application.

Some people are side-stepping the issue by saying that the whole presentation layer must be moved to the front-end, but that approach is really incompatible with the web.

If anything, the current state of the front-end is thanks to server-side developers who want to bring their world view to the browser. (Think: MVC -> Backbone / Ruby -> Coffeescript -- apologies to the authors of those tools)

To have two problems instead of one?

There are already two problems, if you're building a rich client-side web app. Have you done this? If so, you would understand the problem.

"ok, the only language, for now" - which is deeply unnatural for such an innovative field as IT.

A couple alternatives are there:

http://coffeescript.org/ http://elm-lang.org/

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