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There is an easy sense of superiority that comes with derision of "X" and the authoritative sounding romanticization of idealized "Y" seemingly adds weight to t

There is an easy sense of superiority that comes with derision of "X" and the authoritative sounding romanticization of idealized "Y" seemingly adds weight to the argument. Clearly these "Y" people are smarter and better than all those "X" people. Look at all this horrible code! So sad that all these people are not as smart as me. Look at this horrible language! So sad the people that created it are not as intelligent as me! Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. There is no more problem with JavaScript/ES-(name your flavor) than there is with any programming language. Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Sometimes people who appreciate them call these "tradeoffs" or the superior types call them idiotic. The cliche´ of hacker news haters is really really really getting old. So here are some things that are actually good. As much of a pile of hot steaming code as it is, Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool. Of course you can do this in other places but its featuring prominently in the JS community leading to an interesting result. The language and its features become configurable, easy to adapt and change and evolve over time and suit to your liking. This is interesting! Finally as opposed to what others may have said about the community being childish I have found the opposite. I find it to be very welcoming and supportive, friendly and honestly creative. Of course there are lots of negatives, lots of horrible code, lots of mistakes happening. But what is missed in all of this? Theres A LOT of stuff happening that is good even great! It's beautiful chaos! So go on hating, but I see lots of great stuff out there. As one great systems and iOS developer told me the other day "Have you tried Express? Its awesome!" HA yeah. But he just tried it, and loves it! Oh but look at that callback YUCK! Cmon

murbard2 10y ago
So for example, the Javascript rules are no more problematic than the casting rules in other languages, they're just different?
- lootsauce 10y ago
  No, like my cat likes to snuggle but sheds and my dog likes to play but poops too much. Either way they both deserve a bowl of water and some food at the end of the day. You can get all pedantic and say cats are better or dogs are better but guess what. I don't care, I just like my pets.
  - ffggvv 10y ago
    You don't build projects with your pets.
    - thomasfoster96 10y ago
      Hence why it was a metaphor.
      - 59nadir 10y ago
        A fairly useless one at that. It plays on the idea that people don't consider technical merit when choosing programming languages and the metaphor did nothing but trivialize the idea of objectively comparing languages and their strong/weak points.
        thomasfoster96 10y ago
        I agree that the metaphor was partially useless (perhaps poorly worded) - but it's not much better to think that the issue of choosing programming languages is purely objective. You could spend a very long time arguing whether Ruby or Python was better for a particular task, when the important thing is either of them will do a relatively good job for the task at hand and be a better choice than COBOL.
        59nadir 10y ago
        The fact that two or more programming languages are particularly suited for a certain task has absolutely no bearing on the general usefulness of having conversations about what languages are good for. It has absolutely no relevance to state that; the discussion didn't become more or less valid by that assertion. Discussions that are prolonged like that become long because people are not actually being _objective enough_. If you had an objective discussion about Python and Ruby you would conclude that yes, both of these languages have very broad ecosystems and are particularly suited for scripting (and glue work). Python is better suited for scientific computing, etc. Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.
forrestthewoods 10y ago
No. Some languages and platforms are just plain bad. Not everything is equal. Not everyone gets a medal. Liking any particular language doesn't make anyone a bad or stupid person though. Nor does preferring another make you better or smarter.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
qyv 10y ago
Not every tool is the right tool for the job, and finding the right tool for the job is part of doing the job correctly. The thing that always bugged me about node is the argument that using the same tools on the server as in the browser is somehow an advantage. That idea is not a given.
- zongitsrinzler 10y ago
  > Not every tool is the right tool for the job There are not only two jobs: frontend and backend. Saying X language is good/bad for backend..
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    There's more to computing than just websites.
    - brod 10y ago
      Sure, but name any specific computing related thing that doesn't categorically reside within either frontend or backend. And don't say Javascript.
      - adwn 10y ago
        What is a "computing related thing"? Do transistors count? If yes, aren't they both front- and backend? What about threads? Don't they belong to both, the frontend and the backend of "computing related things"? I'm not trying to be obtuse here, I genuinely don't understand your request.
      - et2o 10y ago
        What would you call data science/computational data stuff? Not backend, because you often sit and view the results in your R Studio console or whatever while working interactively. Not frontend because you are often directly mutating data structures and storage.
      - Aaargh20318 10y ago
tigershark 10y ago
There are certainly languages that are better than others. Some of them excel in a particular domain, others do well in other domains. But in general you can tell if a programming language pushes you to write good code or bad code.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. Javascript's type system really doesn't stand up well to scrutiny. That's more crucial than you'd think - the type system is the foundation the rest of the language is built upon. I suspect this is partly why javascript cycles through technologies so often. The foundations are shaky.
- lootsauce 10y ago
  Is it a tradeoff or idiocy (bad idea)? Clearly you are in the "bad idea" camp. No worries, you can use TypeScript. Enjoy! (edited for clarity)
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    > with Babel you can use TypeScript Be careful with throwing "idiocy" at otehrs when it seems you yourself don't even know what you are talking about. To write TypeScript you use... TypeScript (their compiler).
    - lootsauce 10y ago
      Thanks the Babel thing was incorrect, Typescript is separate. To clarify, I'm certainly not implying this person is an idiot. I'm saying, they lean toward thinking that the typing system is more of a bad idea (idiocy) than a valid tradeoff.
      - crdoconnor 10y ago
        Yes, that's accurate. I don't think typescript is necessarily the answer though. You don't fix the problems caused by weak implicit type casts with static typing, you do it by turning off weak implicit type casting and raising a lot more type errors.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- 10y ago
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
No, I think criticism is a good thing. Rants are good. They highlight issues with our current tools and over time that's what leads to progress. Using a plow isn't just different from digging in the dirt with a stick. It's better. For instance, nulls are clearly a problem. After countless rants we're seeing languages that have better ways to deal with missing or optional values enter the mainstream (Swift, Scala, Rust). J2EE's original idea to configure a system through separate XML files was heavily criticised for being too bureaucratic. After countless rants we got configuration by convention, better defaults and annotations as part of the source language. Of course progress is not a straight line and quite often it's not clear what is and isn't progress because there are many trade-offs. But where would we be without a constant process of criticising our tools?
- lootsauce 10y ago
  Totally not against solid critique. But it becomes a culture, a signal of intellectual superiority. Which is too easy. You can be, and I have been highly productive in plain ole JavaScript. Same with Java, Same with Ruby, same with Python. Are the language debates irrelevant, absolutely not. But “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” Hey if it is then I fully submit that I'm just some stupid fool that should rage quit the internet and give up because.... Wait no that would be stupid.
  - richmarr 10y ago
    Completely agree. I'd actually like to list the worst things (IMO) to happen to the software industry. (1) Marketing of computers at boys resulting in a generation of girls being excluded. (2) Software patents suffocating innovators. (3) DMCA & international equivalents (4) Daylight savings time. (5) A generation of programmers being taught that anything other than "OOP best practice" was heresy I'm sure there are plenty I'm missing. Does one particular programming environment deserve to be listed with that stuff? Personally I think it's a pretty ludicrous suggestion.
    - paublyrne 10y ago
Joof 10y ago
Node is very similar to continuation passing style which is used primarily as an intermediate representation in compilers. It's typically considered poor for production code because it's very error prone.
59nadir 10y ago
No, I think the real issue here is people taking languages personally, when there really shouldn't be any reason to. It's very interesting that people form such a personal bond with programming languages, to the point where they will refuse to see how they could be perceived as bad, or cumbersome. Pretty much everyone does it, myself included, and it's one of the more problematic things when it comes to actually discussing languages. People just won't accept that their "baby" (or pet, as was mentioned below) might just be bad. While elitism isn't great, not all criticism and ranting is done from a "We're/I'm better than you" perspective and most rants aren't directed at people. The people using language X might feel they are, but that's simply their own insecurity showing. I think a good portion of defensive posts show this fairly clearly. In the end, is it really that surprising that some of the newer ideas are better than old ideas? Why is it only "fair" to say that a later version of X is better than an earlier version of X, but not that Y can be better than X?
- radioact1ve 10y ago
  Great post; completely agree. I feel a lot of us associate "things" like programming languages with our identity. So if our identity is attacked, we take it personal. Generally you'd think new ideas would win out on old ideas. But you hope the new at least learns from the old. No need to repeat mistakes. This is the criticism I usually see from BSDs towards Linux or programmers towards Golang. Not that I disagree/agree, just an observation.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    I absolutely agree that lots of new stuff is not necessarily better than the old. Particularly when they end up more complicated than what preceded them. I think maybe I overstated the issue of time (what came before, etc.). I should've written it more generally: "Is it inconceivable that one idea/concept/product/language might be better than another?"
- mi100hael 10y ago
  > It's very interesting that people form such a personal bond with programming languages, to the point where they will refuse to see how they could be perceived as bad, or cumbersome. From what I've seen and personally experienced, this happens most often when someone is only strong in that one language. If you've only ever used that language to build applications and someone comes along telling you it sucks, it feels like a personal attack because it would mean you've been doing things wrong or your code/applications suck. It's part of an identity. As people learn new languages and actually gain professional experience with them, that original language is no longer what defines them as a programmer so they no longer need to defend its legitimacy.
EugeneOZ 10y ago
Try to add some counter-arguments instead of just emotions.
zamalek 10y ago
> Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. While I agree in principle, I've been bitten by some incredibly bad node packaging architectural decisions. Just yesterday I was attempting to install tfx-cli in order to CICD our build scripts to our build server - it went as you would expect with npm: MAX_PATH issues. The git clean then failed on all subsequent builds. A problem became unsolvable by virtue of the platform that was used to write it - had tfx-cli been written in almost anything else, this would not have been a problem (I say "almost" because I'm egregiously assuming that at least one other package manager is also broken in this way). So there's an example of node-specific problem and there doesn't seem to be any impetus surrounding solving it. > Oh but look at that callback YUCK! Cmon In defense of Node, it now supports ES6: callback hell is self-imposed for all new code.
- iends 10y ago
  Isn't the max path issue an operating system bug exposed because the tool you were using was designed to run on an OS without that bug?
  - baq 10y ago
    are you implying that design decision is good?
  - zamalek 10y ago
    You can't store an arbitrarily long path regardless of OS. EXT4 only pushes the value to 4096 - meaning that encountering this bug on Linux is only a matter of time. The unreasonably small value on Windows merely resulted in this boundary condition failing sooner. Code merely pushes electrons around, meaning that it has constraints firmly rooted in physics. So no: NPM runs in a universe (regardless of OS) and fails to account for the constraints of that universe by falling into unbounded recursion far too easily. This could have all been avoided by correctly applying graph theory and/or prior wisdom in regard to dynamically loading modules - which has existed for decades. Now we're forced to kludge it with reparse/symlink and that only works on file systems with these features.
- 10y ago
elmigranto 10y ago
> Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool As a sidenote, Babel didn't invent compilers (yes, that is what it is called) or DSLs.
forgottenpass 10y ago
The cliche´ of hacker news haters is really really really getting old. I don't think your rebuttal of a criticism as exhibiting a hater culture is any less cliche. Until the disgustingly contrived artificial hype, and regular poorly-founded misguided hype are all derided too, the haters persist to balance the equation. Or, to rephrase my point in a business-friendly way: garnter_hype_cycle.jpg
devishard 10y ago
> Look at all this horrible code! So sad that all these people are not as smart as me. Look at this horrible language! So sad the people that created it are not as intelligent as me! It's not about being smarter; smart people are a dime a dozen. It's about the fact that what happens in the industry happens to all of us. When a large chunk of the industry adopts callbacks as their threading model, that means I have to either work with their horrible threading models, or not take those jobs. Don't psychoanalyze people who you disagree with; that's just an ad hominem attack. > Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. There is no more problem with JavaScript/ES-(name your flavor) than there is with any programming language. Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Sometimes people who appreciate them call these "tradeoffs" or the superior types call them idiotic. This is the favored defense of people whose favored languages/tools are under attack. But this is absolutely not a tradeoff. A tradeoff is when you make a choice that has some downsides, but you get something for it. With JavaScript in the browser, the tradeoff is clear--you use this shitty awful language and you get to run your code on the browser, because that's pretty much the only reasonable way to run your code in the browser right now. There are alternatives (TypeScript, CoffeeScript) but then you're limited to a smaller community with fewer resources. But with JavaScript on the server, there's no tradeoff. You use this shitty awful language and you get... a shitty awful language. You don't get a reasonable threading model, you don't get a reasonable type system. You don't get anything you couldn't get from another language. It's not a tradeoff, it's just a bad choice. > As much of a pile of hot steaming code as it is, Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool. Of course you can do this in other places but its featuring prominently in the JS community leading to an interesting result. The language and its features become configurable, easy to adapt and change and evolve over time and suit to your liking. This is interesting! Interesting, yes, and useful. But there's really no reason this had to be written in JavaScript, and the code would likely be a lot less of a "pile of hot steaming code" if it were written in a more reasonable ecosystem. > Of course there are lots of negatives, lots of horrible code, lots of mistakes happening. The problem isn't that there is bad code, it's that there isn't any good code. If you needed to write a server-side program and you chose JavaScript, your code is bad and you should feel bad. It's literally impossible to write good server code in JavaScript because it doesn't provide adequate types or threading primitives. It would be different if there weren't alternatives (like in the browser), but there are alternatives which are better.
duaneb 10y ago
Interesting things aren't necessarily good. JavaScript is very difficult to read and maintain, there are dozens of dialects and versions, npm is a complete mess, it's hopelessly single threaded, and we've arguably hit a performance wall optimizing JavaScript in the general case. It is a necessary evil. If you're going to address the "haters", actually address real complaints rather than make very vague comments about beauty and forum culture.
passiveincomelg 10y ago
Creativity is awesome. But when someone asks you to deliver something, spending all day wading through "beautiful chaos" might not be the best approach. In that case boring is better than interesting, IMHO. The more attention can be devoted to the problem at hand, the higher the chance to get the solution right.
zeveb 10y ago
> There is an easy sense of superiority that comes with derision of "X" There's also an easy sense of superiority which comes from being actually superior. > There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. Well, yes, there are problems with Node.js, to include the concurrency model and the language — as indicated in the article. > Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Yes, every system has its own problems, but some systems have fewer or better problems than others, while others have more or worse. There are continua of languages, platforms & OSes. JavaScript-the-language is a bad language. It's not as bad as INTERCAL, but it's worse than C or Lisp. Node.js-the-platform is a bad platform. It's probably not as bad as the Java platform, but it's worse than Go. POSIX is a bad OS. Not nearly as bad as Windows or Mac OS Classic, but worse than Plan 9. One has a very limited number of hours in one's life. Why waste those hours in pursuit of anything other than excellence? Node.js isn't excellent; why spend any time on it?
- passiveincomelg 10y ago
  I agree with the general sentiment, maybe not with all the choices of what's better or worse. And this is where the trouble starts: What is opinion and what are facts? I also agree with your conclusion that avoiding wasting precious lifetime on shi^Wnon-excellence is undesirable. However, given the first problem I mentioned, one can easily waste just as much time trying to figure out what the excellent things to choose are.
matt4077 10y ago
Your argument proves too much, i. e. that all languages / runtimes / frameworks are of equal quality and usefulness and all differences come down to individual taste – and that's obviously absurd.

murbard2 10y ago

So for example, the Javascript rules are no more problematic than the casting rules in other languages, they're just different?

lootsauce 10y ago
No, like my cat likes to snuggle but sheds and my dog likes to play but poops too much. Either way they both deserve a bowl of water and some food at the end of the day. You can get all pedantic and say cats are better or dogs are better but guess what. I don't care, I just like my pets.
- ffggvv 10y ago
  You don't build projects with your pets.
  - thomasfoster96 10y ago
    Hence why it was a metaphor.
    - 59nadir 10y ago
      A fairly useless one at that. It plays on the idea that people don't consider technical merit when choosing programming languages and the metaphor did nothing but trivialize the idea of objectively comparing languages and their strong/weak points.
      - thomasfoster96 10y ago
        I agree that the metaphor was partially useless (perhaps poorly worded) - but it's not much better to think that the issue of choosing programming languages is purely objective. You could spend a very long time arguing whether Ruby or Python was better for a particular task, when the important thing is either of them will do a relatively good job for the task at hand and be a better choice than COBOL.
        59nadir 10y ago
        The fact that two or more programming languages are particularly suited for a certain task has absolutely no bearing on the general usefulness of having conversations about what languages are good for. It has absolutely no relevance to state that; the discussion didn't become more or less valid by that assertion. Discussions that are prolonged like that become long because people are not actually being _objective enough_. If you had an objective discussion about Python and Ruby you would conclude that yes, both of these languages have very broad ecosystems and are particularly suited for scripting (and glue work). Python is better suited for scientific computing, etc. Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.

forrestthewoods 10y ago

No. Some languages and platforms are just plain bad. Not everything is equal. Not everyone gets a medal. Liking any particular language doesn't make anyone a bad or stupid person though. Nor does preferring another make you better or smarter.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

qyv 10y ago

Not every tool is the right tool for the job, and finding the right tool for the job is part of doing the job correctly. The thing that always bugged me about node is the argument that using the same tools on the server as in the browser is somehow an advantage. That idea is not a given.

zongitsrinzler 10y ago
> Not every tool is the right tool for the job There are not only two jobs: frontend and backend. Saying X language is good/bad for backend..
- s_kilk 10y ago
  There's more to computing than just websites.
  - brod 10y ago
    Sure, but name any specific computing related thing that doesn't categorically reside within either frontend or backend. And don't say Javascript.
    - adwn 10y ago
      What is a "computing related thing"? Do transistors count? If yes, aren't they both front- and backend? What about threads? Don't they belong to both, the frontend and the backend of "computing related things"? I'm not trying to be obtuse here, I genuinely don't understand your request.
    - et2o 10y ago
      What would you call data science/computational data stuff? Not backend, because you often sit and view the results in your R Studio console or whatever while working interactively. Not frontend because you are often directly mutating data structures and storage.
    - Aaargh20318 10y ago

tigershark 10y ago

There are certainly languages that are better than others. Some of them excel in a particular domain, others do well in other domains. But in general you can tell if a programming language pushes you to write good code or bad code.

crdoconnor 10y ago

>Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. Javascript's type system really doesn't stand up well to scrutiny. That's more crucial than you'd think - the type system is the foundation the rest of the language is built upon. I suspect this is partly why javascript cycles through technologies so often. The foundations are shaky.

lootsauce 10y ago
Is it a tradeoff or idiocy (bad idea)? Clearly you are in the "bad idea" camp. No worries, you can use TypeScript. Enjoy! (edited for clarity)
- Noseshine 10y ago
  > with Babel you can use TypeScript Be careful with throwing "idiocy" at otehrs when it seems you yourself don't even know what you are talking about. To write TypeScript you use... TypeScript (their compiler).
  - lootsauce 10y ago
    Thanks the Babel thing was incorrect, Typescript is separate. To clarify, I'm certainly not implying this person is an idiot. I'm saying, they lean toward thinking that the typing system is more of a bad idea (idiocy) than a valid tradeoff.
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      Yes, that's accurate. I don't think typescript is necessarily the answer though. You don't fix the problems caused by weak implicit type casts with static typing, you do it by turning off weak implicit type casting and raising a lot more type errors.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
10y ago

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

No, I think criticism is a good thing. Rants are good. They highlight issues with our current tools and over time that's what leads to progress. Using a plow isn't just different from digging in the dirt with a stick. It's better. For instance, nulls are clearly a problem. After countless rants we're seeing languages that have better ways to deal with missing or optional values enter the mainstream (Swift, Scala, Rust). J2EE's original idea to configure a system through separate XML files was heavily criticised for being too bureaucratic. After countless rants we got configuration by convention, better defaults and annotations as part of the source language. Of course progress is not a straight line and quite often it's not clear what is and isn't progress because there are many trade-offs. But where would we be without a constant process of criticising our tools?

lootsauce 10y ago
Totally not against solid critique. But it becomes a culture, a signal of intellectual superiority. Which is too easy. You can be, and I have been highly productive in plain ole JavaScript. Same with Java, Same with Ruby, same with Python. Are the language debates irrelevant, absolutely not. But “Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” Hey if it is then I fully submit that I'm just some stupid fool that should rage quit the internet and give up because.... Wait no that would be stupid.
- richmarr 10y ago
  Completely agree. I'd actually like to list the worst things (IMO) to happen to the software industry. (1) Marketing of computers at boys resulting in a generation of girls being excluded. (2) Software patents suffocating innovators. (3) DMCA & international equivalents (4) Daylight savings time. (5) A generation of programmers being taught that anything other than "OOP best practice" was heresy I'm sure there are plenty I'm missing. Does one particular programming environment deserve to be listed with that stuff? Personally I think it's a pretty ludicrous suggestion.
  - paublyrne 10y ago

Joof 10y ago

Node is very similar to continuation passing style which is used primarily as an intermediate representation in compilers. It's typically considered poor for production code because it's very error prone.

59nadir 10y ago

No, I think the real issue here is people taking languages personally, when there really shouldn't be any reason to. It's very interesting that people form such a personal bond with programming languages, to the point where they will refuse to see how they could be perceived as bad, or cumbersome. Pretty much everyone does it, myself included, and it's one of the more problematic things when it comes to actually discussing languages. People just won't accept that their "baby" (or pet, as was mentioned below) might just be bad. While elitism isn't great, not all criticism and ranting is done from a "We're/I'm better than you" perspective and most rants aren't directed at people. The people using language X might feel they are, but that's simply their own insecurity showing. I think a good portion of defensive posts show this fairly clearly. In the end, is it really that surprising that some of the newer ideas are better than old ideas? Why is it only "fair" to say that a later version of X is better than an earlier version of X, but not that Y can be better than X?

radioact1ve 10y ago
Great post; completely agree. I feel a lot of us associate "things" like programming languages with our identity. So if our identity is attacked, we take it personal. Generally you'd think new ideas would win out on old ideas. But you hope the new at least learns from the old. No need to repeat mistakes. This is the criticism I usually see from BSDs towards Linux or programmers towards Golang. Not that I disagree/agree, just an observation.
- 59nadir 10y ago
  I absolutely agree that lots of new stuff is not necessarily better than the old. Particularly when they end up more complicated than what preceded them. I think maybe I overstated the issue of time (what came before, etc.). I should've written it more generally: "Is it inconceivable that one idea/concept/product/language might be better than another?"
mi100hael 10y ago
> It's very interesting that people form such a personal bond with programming languages, to the point where they will refuse to see how they could be perceived as bad, or cumbersome. From what I've seen and personally experienced, this happens most often when someone is only strong in that one language. If you've only ever used that language to build applications and someone comes along telling you it sucks, it feels like a personal attack because it would mean you've been doing things wrong or your code/applications suck. It's part of an identity. As people learn new languages and actually gain professional experience with them, that original language is no longer what defines them as a programmer so they no longer need to defend its legitimacy.

EugeneOZ 10y ago

Try to add some counter-arguments instead of just emotions.

zamalek 10y ago

> Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. While I agree in principle, I've been bitten by some incredibly bad node packaging architectural decisions. Just yesterday I was attempting to install tfx-cli in order to CICD our build scripts to our build server - it went as you would expect with npm: MAX_PATH issues. The git clean then failed on all subsequent builds. A problem became unsolvable by virtue of the platform that was used to write it - had tfx-cli been written in almost anything else, this would not have been a problem (I say "almost" because I'm egregiously assuming that at least one other package manager is also broken in this way). So there's an example of node-specific problem and there doesn't seem to be any impetus surrounding solving it. > Oh but look at that callback YUCK! Cmon In defense of Node, it now supports ES6: callback hell is self-imposed for all new code.

iends 10y ago
Isn't the max path issue an operating system bug exposed because the tool you were using was designed to run on an OS without that bug?
- baq 10y ago
  are you implying that design decision is good?
- zamalek 10y ago
  You can't store an arbitrarily long path regardless of OS. EXT4 only pushes the value to 4096 - meaning that encountering this bug on Linux is only a matter of time. The unreasonably small value on Windows merely resulted in this boundary condition failing sooner. Code merely pushes electrons around, meaning that it has constraints firmly rooted in physics. So no: NPM runs in a universe (regardless of OS) and fails to account for the constraints of that universe by falling into unbounded recursion far too easily. This could have all been avoided by correctly applying graph theory and/or prior wisdom in regard to dynamically loading modules - which has existed for decades. Now we're forced to kludge it with reparse/symlink and that only works on file systems with these features.
10y ago

elmigranto 10y ago

> Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool As a sidenote, Babel didn't invent compilers (yes, that is what it is called) or DSLs.

forgottenpass 10y ago

The cliche´ of hacker news haters is really really really getting old. I don't think your rebuttal of a criticism as exhibiting a hater culture is any less cliche. Until the disgustingly contrived artificial hype, and regular poorly-founded misguided hype are all derided too, the haters persist to balance the equation. Or, to rephrase my point in a business-friendly way: garnter_hype_cycle.jpg

devishard 10y ago

> Look at all this horrible code! So sad that all these people are not as smart as me. Look at this horrible language! So sad the people that created it are not as intelligent as me! It's not about being smarter; smart people are a dime a dozen. It's about the fact that what happens in the industry happens to all of us. When a large chunk of the industry adopts callbacks as their threading model, that means I have to either work with their horrible threading models, or not take those jobs. Don't psychoanalyze people who you disagree with; that's just an ad hominem attack. > Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. There is no more problem with JavaScript/ES-(name your flavor) than there is with any programming language. Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Sometimes people who appreciate them call these "tradeoffs" or the superior types call them idiotic. This is the favored defense of people whose favored languages/tools are under attack. But this is absolutely not a tradeoff. A tradeoff is when you make a choice that has some downsides, but you get something for it. With JavaScript in the browser, the tradeoff is clear--you use this shitty awful language and you get to run your code on the browser, because that's pretty much the only reasonable way to run your code in the browser right now. There are alternatives (TypeScript, CoffeeScript) but then you're limited to a smaller community with fewer resources. But with JavaScript on the server, there's no tradeoff. You use this shitty awful language and you get... a shitty awful language. You don't get a reasonable threading model, you don't get a reasonable type system. You don't get anything you couldn't get from another language. It's not a tradeoff, it's just a bad choice. > As much of a pile of hot steaming code as it is, Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool. Of course you can do this in other places but its featuring prominently in the JS community leading to an interesting result. The language and its features become configurable, easy to adapt and change and evolve over time and suit to your liking. This is interesting! Interesting, yes, and useful. But there's really no reason this had to be written in JavaScript, and the code would likely be a lot less of a "pile of hot steaming code" if it were written in a more reasonable ecosystem. > Of course there are lots of negatives, lots of horrible code, lots of mistakes happening. The problem isn't that there is bad code, it's that there isn't any good code. If you needed to write a server-side program and you chose JavaScript, your code is bad and you should feel bad. It's literally impossible to write good server code in JavaScript because it doesn't provide adequate types or threading primitives. It would be different if there weren't alternatives (like in the browser), but there are alternatives which are better.

duaneb 10y ago

Interesting things aren't necessarily good. JavaScript is very difficult to read and maintain, there are dozens of dialects and versions, npm is a complete mess, it's hopelessly single threaded, and we've arguably hit a performance wall optimizing JavaScript in the general case. It is a necessary evil. If you're going to address the "haters", actually address real complaints rather than make very vague comments about beauty and forum culture.

passiveincomelg 10y ago

Creativity is awesome. But when someone asks you to deliver something, spending all day wading through "beautiful chaos" might not be the best approach. In that case boring is better than interesting, IMHO. The more attention can be devoted to the problem at hand, the higher the chance to get the solution right.

zeveb 10y ago

> There is an easy sense of superiority that comes with derision of "X" There's also an easy sense of superiority which comes from being actually superior. > There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. Well, yes, there are problems with Node.js, to include the concurrency model and the language — as indicated in the article. > Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Yes, every system has its own problems, but some systems have fewer or better problems than others, while others have more or worse. There are continua of languages, platforms & OSes. JavaScript-the-language is a bad language. It's not as bad as INTERCAL, but it's worse than C or Lisp. Node.js-the-platform is a bad platform. It's probably not as bad as the Java platform, but it's worse than Go. POSIX is a bad OS. Not nearly as bad as Windows or Mac OS Classic, but worse than Plan 9. One has a very limited number of hours in one's life. Why waste those hours in pursuit of anything other than excellence? Node.js isn't excellent; why spend any time on it?

passiveincomelg 10y ago
I agree with the general sentiment, maybe not with all the choices of what's better or worse. And this is where the trouble starts: What is opinion and what are facts? I also agree with your conclusion that avoiding wasting precious lifetime on shi^Wnon-excellence is undesirable. However, given the first problem I mentioned, one can easily waste just as much time trying to figure out what the excellent things to choose are.

matt4077 10y ago

Your argument proves too much, i. e. that all languages / runtimes / frameworks are of equal quality and usefulness and all differences come down to individual taste – and that's obviously absurd.