4 ms·

I recently built a HN clone (for a much smaller community) using exactly this. As a solo / moonlit act, staying in a single language had huge benefits for me.

I recently built a HN clone (for a much smaller community) using exactly this. As a solo / moonlit act, staying in a single language had huge benefits for me. But I don't see the point of using an ORM with MongoDB... not saying ORMs are bad, I just don't think they have much to offer when there is no SQL to abstract and when you're doing everything in JSON anyway (in this stack). If I'm missing something, happy to be enlightened.

derefr 13y ago
> As a solo / moonlit act, staying in a single language had huge benefits for me. As someone who spends each day switching between Erlang, Ruby, Javascript and sometimes C (with various infrastructure components also requiring bits of Java or Go) I find a the idea of a one-language stack sort of mindblowing (though I've always sort of fantasized about connecting my Erlang servers directly to an Erlang VM running in the browser over the distribution protocol.) Would you mind expanding on those "huge benefits", as you've actually experienced them? I've only ever really seen people describing theoretical benefits they imagine they might see if they did this, but nothing from anyone who has.
- muyuu 13y ago
  If you require expertise in 3-4 languages for a project, hiring becomes A LOT harder. And so does code review and assessment. Never mind the learning curve, attack surfaces, etc.
- fla 13y ago
  I think it really depends on the architecture. From my experience (js client <-> HTTP API <-> Express.js <-> Mongo), it never went further than sharing some small bits of code like validation expressions and constants between the client and the server js files. It was just to keep things DRY. I suppose it gets really interessting when you dive into server-side dom manipulation or fully integrated stacks like Meteor.
- sturadnidge 13y ago
  Sure, it's probably more prominent for someone like me who doesn't code for a day job. So it's not just limited to the context switching associated with syntax, it's the peripheral things like language / framework conventions, packaging systems, etc. I am definitely curious about other languages, but I don't have the inclination to spend the time to learn them well enough to build something I would put on the internet. At least not when I can put together a pretty performant / scalable app with a modicum of effort using this stack. These things may not be of much significance to a seasoned polyglot dev, but for someone who only really knows JS and is an infrastructure guy by trade, it makes a big difference :)
yen223 13y ago
While I can definitely see the advantages of only having to work with one language, I really wish that one language wasn't JavaScript.

derefr 13y ago

> As a solo / moonlit act, staying in a single language had huge benefits for me. As someone who spends each day switching between Erlang, Ruby, Javascript and sometimes C (with various infrastructure components also requiring bits of Java or Go) I find a the idea of a one-language stack sort of mindblowing (though I've always sort of fantasized about connecting my Erlang servers directly to an Erlang VM running in the browser over the distribution protocol.) Would you mind expanding on those "huge benefits", as you've actually experienced them? I've only ever really seen people describing theoretical benefits they imagine they might see if they did this, but nothing from anyone who has.

muyuu 13y ago
If you require expertise in 3-4 languages for a project, hiring becomes A LOT harder. And so does code review and assessment. Never mind the learning curve, attack surfaces, etc.
fla 13y ago
I think it really depends on the architecture. From my experience (js client <-> HTTP API <-> Express.js <-> Mongo), it never went further than sharing some small bits of code like validation expressions and constants between the client and the server js files. It was just to keep things DRY. I suppose it gets really interessting when you dive into server-side dom manipulation or fully integrated stacks like Meteor.
sturadnidge 13y ago
Sure, it's probably more prominent for someone like me who doesn't code for a day job. So it's not just limited to the context switching associated with syntax, it's the peripheral things like language / framework conventions, packaging systems, etc. I am definitely curious about other languages, but I don't have the inclination to spend the time to learn them well enough to build something I would put on the internet. At least not when I can put together a pretty performant / scalable app with a modicum of effort using this stack. These things may not be of much significance to a seasoned polyglot dev, but for someone who only really knows JS and is an infrastructure guy by trade, it makes a big difference :)

yen223 13y ago

While I can definitely see the advantages of only having to work with one language, I really wish that one language wasn't JavaScript.