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Based on the trends in "scripting" language programming over the past 30 years including Perl , Python, PHP & Node, i've noticed it's not the "best" language th

Based on the trends in "scripting" language programming over the past 30 years including Perl , Python, PHP & Node, i've noticed it's not the "best" language that wins . There needs to be an intersection of ease of use, a broad component library , adequate toolchain, quick iteration and a vibrant community. Perl & PHP were two examples of languages that were particularly bad fits for their use cases – poor performance, buggy syntax that led to lots of runtime bugs – both were very successful for a time. To answer your question: Node meets the above qualities reasonably well. It also is ambiguous enough to allow lots of navel-gazing over academic tangential topics so people can avoid actually getting work done and waste a lot of wall & CPU time doing so.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Might want to double check the "poor performance" thing when it comes to PHP. In practice, it's kinda hard to beat without dropping scripting languages for something compiled. [EDIT] > To answer your question: Node meets the above qualities reasonably well. It also is ambiguous enough to allow lots of navel-gazing over academic tangential topics so people can avoid actually getting work done and waste a lot of wall & CPU time doing so. OMG, this is spot on, though. Perfect way to put it.
cutler 4y ago
When Perl was popular (late 90s/early 2000s) it had the best performance of any interpreted language especially with regular expressions and mod_perl. If you're comparing Perl with Java or C++ that's apples to oranges.