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I carefully avoided making the statement you've just deconstructed. Nothing in my original post mentions newness. The point I made is that enthusiastic and exc

by DanI-S 14y ago

I carefully avoided making the statement you've just deconstructed. Nothing in my original post mentions newness. The point I made is that enthusiastic and excited developers are valuable. Developers tend to find learning exciting. They could be interested in learning Rails or Django for the first time, trying out Sinatra when a full Rails app seems overkill, or exploring Node for a small and non-critical part of your architecture. Hell, they might be excited about learning PHP. Allowing people to explore their curiosity brings material benefits. It doesn't have to involve new technology, and I didn't suggest that it does. As an aside: > The real market for technology adoption should fueled by demand for simplicity, rather than demand new-ness I think part of node's mass appeal is that it has introduced an element of simplicity to a generation of developers who have grown up around bloat.

javajosh 14y ago
>I carefully avoided making the statement you've just deconstructed. Perhaps you carefully avoid it, but you also strongly implied it. Consider: >You're lucky enough to live at a time where there are numerous production-ready tools with which to do your job. If you choose a tool that you're excited to explore, with an active and fast-moving ecosystem, your excitement and enthusiasm will make you happier and more likely to do a better job. You're optimizing for programmer excitement. There's a famous graph of programmer excitement curves floating around on the net, with a peak at "new and shiny" stage. >Developers tend to find learning exciting. They could be interested in learning Rails or Django for the first time, trying out Sinatra when a full Rails app seems overkill, or exploring Node for a small and non-critical part of your architecture. Hell, they might be excited about learning PHP. I'm not arguing the truth of what you're saying - it's obviously, painfully true that developers absolutely love trying out the new hotness (sometimes even if it's just new to them). I'm simply asserting that this is bad.
- DanI-S 14y ago
  > You're optimizing for programmer excitement. There's a famous graph of programmer excitement curves floating around on the net, with a peak at "new and shiny" stage. I at no point said that this should be the overriding factor. I said that the need to consider developers' personal goals is often understated, and is one of many pieces of information worth weighing when making a decision.
jshen 14y ago
If only a group of more than 5 developers were enthusiastic about the same thing! Your enthusiasm for node is another persons pain. I've got 1 coder enthusiastic about node, another for clojure, and another for scala. Should every project be a different language and ecosystem? What happens when programmers move around in an organization. "I think part of node's mass appeal is that it has introduced an element of simplicity to a generation of developers who have grown up around bloat." Who are you talking about? Right now I'm dealing with a generation of programmers that came up on ruby. Node isn't simpler than sinatra. In fact, we just tried to use node for a "small and non-critical part of your architecture". You know what happened? It took much much longer to finish because it needed to talk to an API that uses digest authentication and node's http library doesn't support that so we had to roll our own.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Does node let you use things like libcurl? I only ask because there are libraries which already have that implemented. I don't use node so I have no idea if it can hook into system-level stuff like that.
  - jshen 14y ago
    The difference is that it's a 5 minute thing in ruby with any of the major http libraries. Is libcurl evented? No matter how you slice that cake, it's a lot more than 5 minutes of effort.

by DanI-S 14y ago

javajosh 14y ago

>I carefully avoided making the statement you've just deconstructed. Perhaps you carefully avoid it, but you also strongly implied it. Consider: >You're lucky enough to live at a time where there are numerous production-ready tools with which to do your job. If you choose a tool that you're excited to explore, with an active and fast-moving ecosystem, your excitement and enthusiasm will make you happier and more likely to do a better job. You're optimizing for programmer excitement. There's a famous graph of programmer excitement curves floating around on the net, with a peak at "new and shiny" stage. >Developers tend to find learning exciting. They could be interested in learning Rails or Django for the first time, trying out Sinatra when a full Rails app seems overkill, or exploring Node for a small and non-critical part of your architecture. Hell, they might be excited about learning PHP. I'm not arguing the truth of what you're saying - it's obviously, painfully true that developers absolutely love trying out the new hotness (sometimes even if it's just new to them). I'm simply asserting that this is bad.

DanI-S 14y ago
> You're optimizing for programmer excitement. There's a famous graph of programmer excitement curves floating around on the net, with a peak at "new and shiny" stage. I at no point said that this should be the overriding factor. I said that the need to consider developers' personal goals is often understated, and is one of many pieces of information worth weighing when making a decision.

jshen 14y ago

If only a group of more than 5 developers were enthusiastic about the same thing! Your enthusiasm for node is another persons pain. I've got 1 coder enthusiastic about node, another for clojure, and another for scala. Should every project be a different language and ecosystem? What happens when programmers move around in an organization. "I think part of node's mass appeal is that it has introduced an element of simplicity to a generation of developers who have grown up around bloat." Who are you talking about? Right now I'm dealing with a generation of programmers that came up on ruby. Node isn't simpler than sinatra. In fact, we just tried to use node for a "small and non-critical part of your architecture". You know what happened? It took much much longer to finish because it needed to talk to an API that uses digest authentication and node's http library doesn't support that so we had to roll our own.

rachelbythebay 14y ago
Does node let you use things like libcurl? I only ask because there are libraries which already have that implemented. I don't use node so I have no idea if it can hook into system-level stuff like that.
- jshen 14y ago
  The difference is that it's a 5 minute thing in ruby with any of the major http libraries. Is libcurl evented? No matter how you slice that cake, it's a lot more than 5 minutes of effort.