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Comment by tesmar2 | Hacker News Reader

> but it's poised to do for technical computing what Node.js is doing for web development

I stopped right there. Node.js has only a few great use cases where it shines and in the real world, the vast majority of shops have not switched to using it.

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> Node.js has only a few great use cases where it shines and in the real world, the vast majority of shops have not switched to using it.

Of course not. 'Switching' is usually more pain than it's worth, especially if your previous solution works. New start-ups are likely the ones who will be using it, just as Rails took off in the start-up world.

Likewise, R and Python are going to continue to be in use in existing projects, and Julia is the potential future...

In my experience, most people are turned off by using Javascript on the backend of web-development. Your experience may be different, but I just don't think the analogy made in the original article is a very good one.

They may be turned off, but in my experience setting up a Nodejs backed site is incredibly easy with the way the frameworks, libraries, and everything are written. That alone will appeal to a lot of people. Front-end only people could easily put together a Nodejs backed up in no time at all.

Or you could use something like Coffee-script from front-to back. It's a very easy eco-system to get into.

I was about to say, they ought to be turned off by JavaScript on the back end when there are so many other options. Then I remebered that people use PHP more often than not for back end work.

Rails took off among startups because it made it so much more efficient to iterate on design, but node.js is nothing like that. I actually tried node.js for a while and came back to rails because it's simply not convenient enough. Like the guy below said, it's great for certain use cases but overall it doesn't bring much else to the table.

I'm not a Node.js guy, but aren't you comparing two things that aren't comparable ? Would it be more fair to compare say Express and Rails ?

There's all these other "frameworks" on top of node you can use to emulate rails, of which Express is the most popular. But I am talking in terms of tools to use when I'm building a database backed REST app. Node.js was hot so I took some time building apps entirely using node--some with express, some with other "more advanced mvc" frameworks--but they're all mediocre at best compared to Rails. I am not comparing node with rails. I'm saying node is not good for building web apps because all you have is all these inferior web development frameworks. Either you need to write too much boilerplate code, or learn to use half baked frameworks that will get nowhere as much traction as rails

I'm not a Node.js user and I'v certainly gotten the feeling that it's rapidly proliferating and shaking things up. Given that it's less than 5 years old, I think that's pretty cool.

I think he might mean "shaking things up" (which Node certainly has done) rather than "taking over the world" (which, as you point out, it has not).

>I think he might mean "shaking things up" (which Node certainly has done)

How has it "shaken things up"? It is yet another irrelevant mess of crap a few dumb web monkeys use. There's one of those every other month.

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