Node.js and the Road Ahead | Hacker News Reader

Node.js and the Road Ahead

blog.nodejs.org

112 pointsfcambus45 comments

I really don't like that Joyent basically 'owns' nodejs. They gain from more people using nodejs and using it in a certain way; the complex dynamic happening here is a major turn-off (Joyent controls the nodejs repo). Not to mention the recent brouhaha in which Joyent facilitated forcing out one of the biggest nodejs contributors, an individual who incidentally happened to be an employee of their biggest competitor. Do you really want to use the products of this environment?

Guys, guys, come on. We should respect their wishes to never talk about that again and forget the whole thing ever happened.[1]

I mean, it's not like they ought to apologize for the atrocious way they facilitated the virtual lynching of one of their core contributors. Better to just sweep it all under the rug.

[1] http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/12/03/bnoordhuis-departure/

EDIT: For the folks that say it's just "petty drama", I invite you to read another man's account of a very similar experience: http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/6/5075106/adam-orth-xbox-one-...

Internet bullying isn't just some thing that happens to teenagers. It's a stream of tweets, phone calls, texts, hate mail, death threats, and more. I can only speculate about how much of that Ben received, but a fair share of it was very public, and Joyent was a participant in that.

As the face of node.js it was Joyent's responsibility to defuse the situation and protect the people involved. Instead they threw gasoline into the fire, further inciting the mob justice that was already well underway.

We should respect their wishes to never talk about that again

It's hardly just their wishes. Plenty of us wish that any discussion about Node wouldn't immediately get dragged down into petty drama. Maybe we could, y'know, talk about the language and ecosystem for a change.

I think you posted your reply just as I made an edit to my comment. I invite you to re-read my comment and reassess the value of the "petty drama".

"virtual lynching"

Hyperbole much?

"...to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent..."

That was (imo) the worst part of the blog post. You're comparing death threats from obsessed fans of a platform known for being filled with users of a younger age, to angry backhanded tweets and blog posts from professional software developers.

C'mon now.

I really have a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. People are upset that Joyent called him an asshole on their company blog, and things really did get out of hand on github for a period of time (I suspect most of that has been "cleaned up" by now).

Not sure what you mean by "... of a platform known for being filled with users of a younger age." Is this really true, or is it some kind of attempt at an insult?

The platform he's referring to is Xbox, per the Adam Orth article. It's a game console, some of the people insulting him were likely children.

Petty Drama

Where we you when Adria Richards was being virtually bullied? My guess is that you were DDoSing SendGrid.

Hey, if you want to use ad hominem to discredit my argument be my guest, but at least put a little effort into it.

Seriously, I use Zikes everywhere, it wouldn't even be that difficult.

I expect that most people, like myself, want to use good development tools and platforms, rather than waste time getting involved in whatever petty drama happens to be going on.

Node is open-source, and if Joyent act like assholes, it'll be forked.

The "we/you can just fork it" argument really doesn't work out. And when it's used by maintainers to justify something, it's a total cop-out.

The fact is that forking it will fragment the community, confuse users, slow down adoption, and generally have negative effects for years and years. Even if everyone eventually moves to the fork (best-case scenario!), the ecosystem will have lost tremendous amounts of momentum.

> The "we/you can just fork it" argument really doesn't work out.

Worked pretty well for MySQL.

Not really, MariaDB has nowhere near the adoption levels MySQL has.

Even so, MySQL was one of the biggest gratis databases, and it happened to be bought by a company that specialized in selling established enterprise database software. There was concern RE the support a gratis database would have under such a company.

The situation that created MariaDB is very specific, and very different to the one Node.js is in.

LibreOffice then?

I think the XOrg fork from XFree86 is the best example I can think of.

I bet if we forked it people would migrate no problem, as long as most the major contributors were involved. IMHO Joyent doesn't add much value, at least that I've seen, if anything they seem to want to keep it fragile so you have to use their tools to debug it properly.

" Not to mention the recent brouhaha in which Joyent facilitated forcing out one of the biggest nodejs contributors, an individual who incidentally happened to be an employee of their biggest competitor."

Who was that?

Ben Noordhuis. See [1] for Joyent's opinion on the matter.

1 - http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

As someone with a considerable amount of nodejs code in production, this kind of behavior makes me really worried about the project's long term health.

Wow, that is actually disgusting. How far up their own asses are Joyent?

>> "an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well."

If this had been written by The Onion, and not Joyent, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash.

Someone also raised the point that Noordhuis is not a native English speaker, and his native tongue uses gendered nouns to begin with. Someone with that experience is probably less likely to see a problem with the concept of gendered nouns. While it's common for the Dutch to speak several languages, English is the only one I am aware of that doesn't gender nouns.

The irony is that if Joyent had've shown the empathy they demand, they might have allowed some leeway for error, and strove to have done better next time. I was significantly disappointed in that Joyent blog post. Hopefully Cantrill has learned his lesson and next time will seek to heal rifts rather than exacerbate them. It's actually still not too late to use the same channel - the commercial blog - to do a mea culpa apology and promise to be more reserved in future.

Interesting point. The plot thickens further, to the point where in one day I've gone from respecting Joyent (for their support of node contributors and thus node itself) to; I really fucking dislike this company, their people and the way they think. Equating lack of empathy (as quoted by your parent) to technical incompetence is just mind bogglingly infuriating.

This politically correct at all costs way of thinking needs to be bludgeoned to death.

I think that blog post is a bit hyperbolic, but I agree an employee should be punished for not accepting such a pull request.

Yes, I do know it is a "troll" account. However I also know that having non-gendered pronouns in popular open source projects helps non-men feel more welcome.

I wasn't aware of this recent nodejs drama but, boy, what a non-surprise to see it involves Bryan Cantrill of all. Only good memories from his time in the OpenSolaris project. Except not.

I guess Sun's legacy of jerks in opensource projects is yet to die off.

Holy shit, what a ridiculous comment and company.

Ben Noordhuis: http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/12/03/bnoordhuis-departure/

It's a repo, it can be forked at any moment if something goes awry. And I don't really think a misguided blog post is 'forcing out one of the biggest nodejs contributors'.

I'd rather have nice tools made possible by a company I disagreed with on petty grounds than no tools at all.

1. There are SO MANY open source projects that are "owned" by companies. It's nothing new.

2. I'm so tired of hearing about the supposed "drama" of the NodeJS community from people who don't understand open source projects. For one, I checked the guy's github yesterday and he still contributes to node, so his "taking my ball and going home" bit was a bluff. More importantly, though, is the point that this person went out of his way to stop an open source contribution that he personally didn't agree with. He did, in effect, more work by declining the pull request and injecting his own beliefs into a community project.

I feel it needs to be said that I applaud Joyent's position on gender inclusiveness since we clearly have a LONG way to go to get people to start caring about issues like this.

I think you really should really reexamine the situation that occurred if you think the person "went of of his way to stop an open source contribution that he personally didn't agree with." That is not what happened.

Either you don't understand what happened or you are intentionally spreading FUD.

Ben rejected the pull request because there was no CLA from the contributor. It was a one line change, but it didn't adhere to the process established by the node core. (He's also English as a second language and didn't see how this could be offensive). Another contributor, Isaac, entered the fray and accepted the pull request (it's not clear if there was a signed CLA at this point), subverting the authority of the other core contributor. At this point it becomes a question of authority between two core contributors one working for Joyent and one for Strongloop. It seems there was already something negative between the developers and the companies before this occurred. Out of anger of his authority being subverted Ben reverted the pull request again. Isaac didn't communicate with Ben, and Ben was angry. Both handled it poorly, but Ben comes out looking poorly because the internet hate mob doesn't think before acting.

Ben rejected the pull request because there was no CLA from the contributor.

Funny, because what he said was:

"Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

Why not let him speak for himself?

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

"Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.

Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?

Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.

To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?

I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks."

Thanks, I tried to find this but couldn't for some reason.

Yes, and that was valid from his POV, and from what I understand, consistent with his past behaviour regarding minor grammatical/spelling mistakes.

And I get that - for some projects, the sheer overhead of every single person arguing their grammatical opinion on internal docs just wouldn't be worth it.

And yes, I know, for some people this was a major travesty on our social fabric, and the social justice warriors came out in full force about how it was apparently incredibly sexist on Ben's part.

However, that was basically just bike-shedding.

This entire debacle should have sorted out graciously between the parties involved - there was no need to turn it into a public freakshow that it became.

Look, yes, it would be nice if we used non-gender specific pronouns everywhere. Let's change the doc standards to reflect that. But going on a retroactive witch-hunt hurts nobody.

In fact, I'd venture that this little crusade probably did more to hurt getting females into technology, when they see how incredibly immature and petty we "boys" are, and how they'll always be seen in terms of their gender and "protected" rather that just being another geek.

Finally, the fact that the damn guy volunteers and mentors aspiring developers - including gasp females - makes the lynch mob look even worse.

how they'll always be seen in terms of their gender and "protected" rather that just being another geek

My wife hates the Nineteenth Amendment for that exact reason: the idea that men "gave" women the right to vote (and thus, in principle, could take it away again) frustrates her.

She'd rather a new Constitution that cleans up all the fixes we've made through the amendment process that treats men, women, races, and sexual orientations all equally. It's hard to argue that wouldn't be an improvement over what we have now.

That's actually a problem with things like "Girls Who Code" or whatever it's called: while getting girls coding, it also introduces the idea that girls don't code, and that when they do, it's "novel". Anyway, I don't have a solution for that (and I'm not opposed to those efforts in any way), it's just something to keep in mind.

> It's hard to argue that wouldn't be an improvement over what we have now.

I mean, I guess it's ok if you want to speak on behalf of your wife, but now you're just putting words in everyone's mouth. Enough already.

I strongly disagree with creating a new Constitution; we have so many people in Congress looking to take away our rights that we'd be lucky if our First Amendment rights stayed intact. Imagine members of Congress trading abortion rights for non-establishment. It would be a shit show on every level.

  > That's actually a problem with things like 
  > "Girls Who Code" or whatever it's called: 
  > while getting girls coding, it also introduces 
  > the idea that girls don't code, and that when 
  > they do, it's "novel". Anyway, I don't have a 
  > solution for that (and I'm not opposed to those 
  > efforts in any way), it's just something to 
  > keep in mind.

You make a valid point. But there is some research that suggests that limiting membership to certain groups does make members of that group more likely to participate[1][3]. It sounds counter-intuitive to me, but the research and examples are there.

I agree that in an ideal world, we would simply find the idea of "girls who code" equally weird as the idea of "girls who breathe"

But the unfortunate truth is, there is a gender gap in programming. Its very real - we all know the stats. There is a reason for this gap, and it very likely has something to do with our society, culture, and us. I don't know about you, but I'd like to find out more about what those reasons are, and if there is something I can do to change that, I would. Why not? It would be great!

The one thing I disagree about is that angry attacks or lynch mobs are a good strategy to go about this. Most male programmers are highly intelligent individuals - if the reasoning behind an idea is explained to them in a calm and logical manner, I believe they will be very likely to accept the explanation. In contrast, if the explanation or actions are interpreted as a personal attack, they may feel threatened and will be more likely to just attempt to defend themselves. Because they would be afraid of being personally accused, shamed and socially cast out.

Even ideas such as privilege blindness can be explained in this manner - articles such as [2] and [3] are good examples (I'd guess that the pattern is that a personal story is more likely to produce good results)

[1]: http://www.singlesexschools.org/evidence.html

[2]: http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm

[3]: https://medium.com/tales-from-the-front/cc9ed433ec3c

NodeJS is an idea(and a trademark...) but there is no reason why it couldnt be ported to other envirronments like the JVM for instance. Joyent and a few other businesses own NodeJS development that's a fact,i'm curious as to how they will make money out of it.

"the complex dynamic happening here is a major turn-off (Joyent controls the nodejs repo)"

Can you clarify what off-putting complex dynamic you're referring to?

I predict that 0.10.x will be with us for a long time. It's now the Windows XP SP2 of Node.js releases. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes before Joyent refuses to accept patches to the 0.10.x branch. When they do, that'll be the point to seriously consider moving off of Node.js to a project with adults running it.

In addition to all of the political crap with Joyent, the changes in 0.12.x are incredibly onerous at the C++ level, for no obvious benefit whatsoever (thanks, v8 team). I know our company is sticking with 0.10.x for the indefinite future because we're not allocating man power to update the dozen or so compiled node modules we use (along with all of the new bugs changing that many changes will inevitably bring with it).

Instead, in the future we'll be dropping down to either libuv directly (all of our compiled libraries are written in C–C++ is just used to bind to Node.js), and we're also looking carefully at luvit, since Lua binds to C so nicely, and LuaJIT is seriously awesome. :)

So between Joyent forcing Ben Noordhuis out and their corporate "it's our way or the highway" bullshit, we just have a really bad taste in our mouths about the future of Node.js with Joyent at the helm.

I agree entirely. I'm particularly disappointed with Isaac, whose response to a proposal for foundation was this https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJ... which he claims it would cost 1-2m a year for a node foundation. Either this is FUD, or he's missing something (or I am).

Apparently you've never gone through a major version update to a language.

Link to yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7064470 - "The Next Phase of Node.js"

FWIW, different discussion. That was from the outgoing maintainer, this from the incoming one.

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