While I absolutely share your confusion as to why this particular link sat towards the top of HN for so long, there are lots of reasons to be interested in Back

While I absolutely share your confusion as to why this particular link sat towards the top of HN for so long, there are lots of reasons to be interested in Backbone.js. Ideally, there is little to no configuration, a very minimal set of conventions imposed by the library (especially when compared with others in the space), and as many or as few files as you feel like using. But to be specific: Backbone.js is a minimal implementation of the foundation that many MVC-ish JavaScript apps tend to acquire during their lifetimes. I would imagine that in many of your visualization/data apps, you have models of the data, and UI components that render the data and react to changes in the models. Backbone gives you convenience methods for those basic operations: binding events to changes in the data, granular re-rendering of UI components, map, reduce, filter, reject, serializing models to/from JSON ... and leaves the rest of it up to you. Off the top of my head, here's an example where having data modeled in Backbone was very helpful to implement a visualization: http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2011/10/entity-charts/ http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2011/10/entity-charts/