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I don't see it. Any old idiot can learn a programming language. The difficulty doesn't come from the language, it comes from the environment and tooling.
by BigJono 8y ago
I don't see it. Any old idiot can learn a programming language. The difficulty doesn't come from the language, it comes from the environment and tooling.
- inimino 8y agoThen the environment and tooling sucks. This is a large part of what Ryan Dahl tried to solve with Node, and I think he got a lot of it right, leading to immediate popularity of the project. Most of the "infrastructure" stuff around deployment and, obviously, the JS ecosystem with all of its build tools and dependency explosions is still a mess, but it's important to keep eyes on the goal of getting rid of incidental complexity. Early Node did that well, modern typical Node development is of course another matter. Once you get rid of as much accidental complexity in the environment as you can, having one less language to use is a huge win.
- overcast 8y agoSo what's your alternative? I don't know of any environment easier than installing Node. I type 'n latest', and yarn add/install. Done. Ruby? Laughable. PHP has a zillion dependencies. Go with all of its system paths. Java VM, no thank you.
- BigJono 8y agoYou completely missed the point. My point isn't that node is better or worse than any of them, my point is that if you're starting from scratch with no back-end knowledge, then the benefit of already knowing the language you're going to use on the back-end is dwarfed so heavily by the other stuff you have to learn that it's inconsequential.