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I think it's quite interesting to see that originally node.js was presented as a bloat-free alternative to "enterprise languages" like Java, C# or even Python o

• cpeterso 8y ago
  That's a good example of the Innovator's Dilemma: the enterprise incumbent is unseated by some "crappy" lightweight solution that is easier to get up to speed and solves enough of the problem. The complexity, accidental and essential, comes later.
  • weberc2 8y ago
    Nevertheless, people who need a lightweight language are always able to find one because there is always a new language at that point in its lifecycle. Further, there are languages like Go which seem to be determined to remain easy to get up and running, and don't seem likely to change anytime soon (for better or worse).
    • cpeterso 8y ago
      It will be interesting to see if some new language eventually seeks to disrupt Go by "out Go'ing" Go, returning to its approachable roots. (Amusingly, my iPhone autocorrect replaced "roots" with "Russ". Russ Cox is an engineer who works on Go. :)
  • royjacobs 8y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what's happening. Existing tools are seen as too complex because people don't seem to be realizing that the complexity is not accidental, but necessary. I'm not trying to say that Java has no accidental complexity of course, I don't want to open that can of worms :)
    • jeremyjh 8y ago
      Well there is also a problem with people who don't want to say no, and don't want to stop working on their project when it is finished. Adding all the features that appease a different 1% of your user base is what leads to the bloat - and it still is bloat when 90% of your users will never use the functionality that externalizes all kinds of leaky abstractions and other costs onto them. Just because that bloat may happen to your successor as well doesn't make it right in either case.
    • alirobe 8y ago
      Which complexity is actually necessary? Does it change when you have 400gbit, SSDs, and watchOSes? How about 1TB of core memory? If we aren't wrangling with handling 75 spinning disk's connected to a 10mbit network with 13" blurry CRT monitors, perhaps we don't need to discuss the finer points of engineering efficient client/server LOB applications? Perhaps we ought to discuss MDM, RF, ML, and lifestyle impacts. This is all just the process of evolution at play. What seems obvious today wasn't yesterday - applies to biology, material science, medicine, engineering, art, music, architecture, design, taxi services, marketing, government, politics, and so why shouldn't it be so in computing? Sidenote: I love the humility of this video. I remember the days when node was first unleashed. I could not have imagined how it has changed the way we all work. It all seemed so obvious from day one, and here we are today. What a brilliant contribution.
  • orf 8y ago
    See: mongodb
    • StavrosK 8y ago
      This is pretty much a perfect example. That and dynamic languages, although dynamic languages happened because the happy medium of types is type inference, and previous popular typed languages were too verbose/inflexible. We're definitely reinventing the wheel a lot, though.
    • mxschumacher 8y ago
      now a publicly listed company with $2.55bn in market cap
      • orf 8y ago
        and that makes it a good database, right?
• dnomad 8y ago
  Watching the Javascript poorly reinvent the wheel has been very disappointing. Very simple mistakes like immutable, never changing build releases that Java developers understood 15 years ago are become recent front page news in this community. Ironically, even though all the code is open-source pre-existing knowledge does not get leveraged in the open source world. There's a kind of market failure at work here it seems; the lack of commercial selective pressure results in the flourishing of lots of poorly researched OS solutions.
  • wolco 8y ago
    I like the energy around the javascript everywhere movement. So what if they reinvent the wheel, sometimes you find a better wheel and break the rules along the way. There is something exciting about developers using a language in ways it was never designed. Then having the language change to support the changing ecosystem...
    • ahansen 8y ago
      So true, at the end of the day people are working like this because it's the way they feel the most passionate about. You can't really blame them considering how disinterested people can get working on that last 10% of even their own projects.
      • kingludite 8y ago
        haha, why do we do this? Should we judge programmers by how finished their thing is? I think it is the most impressive quality when I see it (which is non of my own stuff haha)
    • ppeetteerr 8y ago
      It's when you build a business on a technology and then have to re-invest to rebuild the product, that's when it becomes an issue. Think of all the start ups that built running businesses on Angular 1.
      • 8y ago
• bartread 8y ago
  I think the problem with "bloat-free" is it's a fine ideal until you try to solve any kind of reasonably complex problem, and honestly it starts to creep in even when you're solving something that isn't particularly complex. Here's a concrete example. Your classic node.js or express.js sample app is something fairly simple like a hello world, or an IM server. A more complex sample probably looks something like that venerable nodecellar app from a few years back. In all cases the spiel is, "Hey, look how easy it is to create a web server with node." Except that I'm looking at my node server source right now - for an honestly fairly simple app containing a handful of pages and a blog - and here's what I have: - Routing (obviously) - Cookie and body parsing - Session management - MongoDB integration - Passport.js for authentication with a couple of providers (FB and Twitter) - File system access - HTTPS and SPDY/HTTP2 support - Compression support - Logging with winston and morgan, including loggly integration - Referer spam filtering - Pug templates - Hexo blog integration - Path resolution support - Request validation and redirects - Static content support - Stripping headers such as X-Powered-By, and adding other headers such as the all-important X-Clacks-Overhead - Error handling There's probably a couple of other items I missed, but you get the idea. It seems like a lot but, as far as I'm concerned, this is express.js app MVP for anything you might want to put into production. I haven't even mentioned the gulpfile I use to build all this, which targets desktop, mobile, along with embedded versions for a particular mobile app due to launch in the near future, and has become something of a behemoth[1]. Nor have I mentioned that I have Cloudflare to sit in front of this, primarily to deal with the heavy lifting of some of the media files I serve up. On the face of it, this might feel like "bloat" but it's all necessary to run the application and, like I say, a lot of it is the bare minimum for an MVP web app in node. [1] Yes, I know I could/should switch to webpack, but gulp works, and switching to webpack "just because" doesn't justify itself with the value it might add.
  • royjacobs 8y ago
    It's interesting that you mention gulp and webpack when those tools too are now considered too complex and set to be usurped by something like Brunch. It's a shame these tools keep being rewritten because there are definitely good ideas in all of them, but for some reason they can't seem to be unified.
• DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  It's always like this. I'm lucky enough to have been around the industry for a while. I could probably count a dozen or more things that started out "Like X, only without all the BS!" --- only to end up with just as much BS or more than X ever had.
  • DenisM 8y ago
    It's an anthropological effect, not a technological one. A new generation of craftsmen faces a choice between submitting to the rules of the old guard and making up their own rules. Reduced complexity is often a rallying cry, but I think the root of the phenomenon is in trying to find one's own social and professional standing in the situation where all the prominent positions are already taken and what little is left requires years of hard labor (complexity, certification, corporate review system, etc). If this situation upsets you consider the alternatives, they might be worse.
    • DanielBMarkham 8y ago
      Agreed. Tech is ripe for applied group psychology and anthropology. The social, psychological, and anthropological factors are obvious to casual observers -- but completely invisible to the people they affect the most. There's a reason for it, and perhaps overall it's a good thing....but that still doesn't mean that it can't be accepted and acknowledged as a facet of the community.
    • rwallace 8y ago
      This reminds me of when I first read about fractals: a collection of phenomena I've been staring at all my life, but never really saw until someone pointed out how to see them. Currently popular music mostly sounds like noise to me, but that's not the point. What are the current generation of musicians supposed to do, be silent and spend their lives listening to the great bands of my youth? It's impossible to match Pink Floyd in the style of Pink Floyd. They need a new style. Facebook is losing traffic to whatever is the latest trend in social media, not really because people are suddenly paranoid about privacy, but because each generation needs a network where the previous generation is not. And for as long as humans write programs, there will be a need to invent new languages, not because the old languages were technically inadequate, but because each generation of programmers needs a way to escape the shadow of the previous generation, the way acorns need squirrels to carry them away from the shadow of oak trees.
• jrochkind1 8y ago
  I think this is a story that gets repeated lots of times in our world of open source software dev. 1. X is SO bloated and poorly engineered full of bad legacy decisions. 2. We can totally do better let's invent a new thing, Y! 3. Wow, Y is so clean and fast and understandable. 4. But it doesn't do this thing a bunch of people reasonably really need... let's add it. (repeat 3 and 4 a few hundred times) 5. Y is so bloated and poorly engineered and full of legacy decisions. We can do better! (Go to 1.) The grass is always greener, but mature complicated software is _usually_ complicated for... reasons.
  • manigandham 8y ago
    Yes, because the loop never solves the original problem. It's about organization and bloat, not pure speed and leanness. Rebuild from scratch but also recreate all the existing functionality in a much better standard library and finally the chain can be broken. But nobody wants to do that.
    • ahansen 8y ago
      I believe this is what Microsoft is trying to do with .NET Core. It's been successful so far, though they aren't at feature parity yet.
      • manigandham 8y ago
        Yes, arguably the .NET Framework almost did it and is still one of the most productive frameworks available, but .NET Core has definitely improved things substantially. It's fast, well-designed, and full-featured and I expect usage to pick up greatly.
        • lewisinc 8y ago
          Can I use F# with it? Because I would love to learn me some F# some day.
          • 8y ago
• spraak 8y ago
  I missed that in the presentation. Are you referencing something else when you say that > originally node.js was presented as a bloat-free alternative to "enterprise languages" ?
• rmrfrmrf 8y ago
  Maven is still garbage and 100 times more bloated than npm. It literally has all the same issues npm has, only with less support.
• didibus 8y ago
  I think the truth is even sadder. The new generations hear the complaints of the old. They hear, I hate spring, Java is so bloated, XML hell, etc. So they think damn I don't want to touch Java with a ten foot poll. That's when they go instead with the newer system, that didn't exist long enough to have accumulated criticism. Which is backed by enthusiasts still in the honeymoon period.
  • grosjona 8y ago
    Yes so true. People should spend more time thinking about the side effects of their actions and speeches before they make them.
    • PinkMilkshake 8y ago
      No, people should speak what they believe to be true. The onus is on the listeners to not blindly accept everything they hear as reality.
      • grosjona 8y ago
        When an authority figure says something, listeners are more likely to accept it, even if it is wrong. That's just human nature. So authority figures have an extra duty to think about the effects of what they're saying. They owe their success to these people and so the way that they can pay it back is by using their voice as a tool for improving things.
• nurettin 8y ago
  I am surprised that you've only mentioned npm. The current complexity of webpack and the number of frameworks, the language going over multiple ES revisions and type-safe alternatives to the language makes it seem like the eventual complexity is almost unavoidable and simplicity is a marketing fad.