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grayrest

> It's my opinion that JS is the new lingua franca of programming, and it's about time we replaced C/Java.

Steve Yegge beat you to it: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht...

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Learning Scala right now. Seems it fits nicely as the NBL according to Steve Yegge's criteria:

#1 C-like syntax (might be closer to Ruby actually)

#2 Static-typing but feels pretty dynamic due to extremely good type inference

#3 Perform on par with plain Java

#4 IDE(Eclipse/NetBean) support

#5 Everything in the "Kitch sink" section included + Actor-based threadless concurrency + easy to write embedded DSL + (I heard even continuation is coming soon). So what's missing is a macro system ...

#6 JVM so multiplatform by default (even on Android)

I code in Scala for some time now. Love this language! Though I think that Node.JS is something different and has different purpose(yet to be discovered). Scala as any language that runs on JVM, doesn't completely support Non-Blocking IO(this should be fixed in Java 7 though).

"JVM, doesn't completely support Non-Blocking IO"

Isn't java.nio supposed to provide non-blocking IO (at least for socket)?

Yeah, for sockets java.nio does that just fine, not for files. Of course, it's an improvement over plain java.io but still it's not non-blocking.

Actually, given improvements in threading, NIO doesn't give faster socket throughput in typical many-connection servers. See:

http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2008/03/writing-java-multithrea...

JVM so multiplatform by default (even on Android)

Even on Android what? Which Scala based project I could run on Android unmodified?

Where I can get JVM for linux/bsd on ARM?

I think I've read a couple of perspectives on why JS would be the "NBL", and I wasn't trying to claim I was the first to come to that conclusion.

I'm saying that I think that this is JavaScript's first implementation in the wild that I've liked enough to want to do non-web programming in.

I thought doing "http server programming" is pretty much in the same category as doing "web programming"?

This article is about HTTP server programming, but node.js implements a number of features that are just good for general-purpose programming of all kinds: a good system for including modules, a decent I/O interface, robust events.

I'm not so excited by this guy writing an HTTP server in JavaScript. I'm excited about the potential of JavaScript in writing elegant, high-performance apps that aren't tied to the web.

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