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Comment by danpeddle | Hacker News Reader

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).

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A couple alternatives are there:

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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