5 ms·

> Future of Popular Coding Tool in Doubt After It Splits in Two Are there convincing number of examples of very popular projects being forked and both ends bei

> Future of Popular Coding Tool in Doubt After It Splits in Two Are there convincing number of examples of very popular projects being forked and both ends being discontinued, or is this just a typical example of spreading FUD? Forking is a natural process in the open-source world.

Thaxll 12y ago
But it's true that Node is losing traction.
- bhouston 12y ago
  Node is losing traction where? I see it as being very strong, but it isn't the shiny new thing any more -- which means that it is beyond the first few stages of the hype cycle. It has very strong growth in Google trends: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js
  - artursapek 12y ago
    I think Google trends is a very laggy indicator of something like this.
    - ocfx 12y ago
      Agreed
    - mbesto 12y ago
      No, but this is: http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django%2C+node.js%2C+angular.js%2C+ember.js&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby+on+rails...
- cloakandswagger 12y ago
  I see this more as a return to reality from Node.js's astronomical levels of hype. The use cases for a single-threaded web server are specific and limited in the real world. Node.js will continue to solve those use cases (simple web server for static content or I/O bound apps) but the resultant decline will lead some to believe that the framework is dying.
  - bhouston 12y ago
    > The use cases for a single-threaded web server are specific and limited in the real world. We use Node.JS to run https://Clara.io https://Clara.io. Clara.io isn't at all a simple website. I think you are underestimating Node.JS's flexibilities and capabilities.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Perhaps you could name some website/app servers that aren't mostly i/o (or event-timing) bound? I wouldn't say the use cases are limited at all. You can always run multiple process instances, and communication between processes isn't really so different in practice than inter-server communication... Which just means you are scaling horizontally by design earlier in development.
    - cloakandswagger 12y ago
      I worked on some web-based project management software which was highly CPU-bound. A typical scenario would be the application querying a database for financial figures, doing a large amount of calculations on those figures and then generating an HTML report from them. I imagine any application with large amounts of business logic like this will be the same.
      - jessaustin 12y ago
        Could you describe the sorts of calculations those were? Are these regressions or similar? Do PMs really look at that sort of thing? Maybe they were basing a TSP on the latest financial figures? b^) It seems possible that was a mostly IO-bound system, and the things which could have been conceivably CPU-bound should just have been batched and cached.
      - tracker1 12y ago
        I would suggest that what you are describing is the exception to the rule... Most queries, in such a case could either be done in the database or pushed to the browser... Generally if you're doing something CPU bound that isn't video processing or gaming, you push that out of process through a worker queue anyhow.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- qooleot 12y ago
  By what, hacker news discussions? It seems here only "new" things are discussed, but not as much about platforms growing and stabilizing. Its almost like Rust and Golang have taken over the world if you measure by this community.
  - takeda 12y ago
    My prediction is that Go will disappear in same way as it happen to Ruby, Perl and others. It currently rides on the fame that it comes from Google "so it hast to be good". It doesn't really provide anything revolutionary, it just is more friendly toward writing specific type of applications. Just by seeing that majority of people who are using Go are the ones who always explore new languages, and you see majority of people coming from dynamically typed languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP and others makes me convinced of this position. Rust on the other hand also has a bit of hype, but that hype actually has a base. It is due to a features that are quite significant, not because it comes from Mozilla. The ability to do memory safety checks at compile time is quite a big deal (maybe Rust is not first here to offer that, but it is first that it build the entire language around it). I believe that Rust actually really has a huge chance to replace C and C++ (languages that were developed in 70s and 80s respectively) and influence future languages.
    - kibwen 12y ago
      > My prediction is that Go will disappear in same way as it > happen to Ruby, Perl and others. Languages don't really ever disappear, they just become less trendy and therefore invisible to places like HN that revolve around hipness and novelty. Hell, when was the last time you heard about Perl? And yet there is an enormous amount of Perl out there powering systems the world over, and learning Perl will make you quite employable for maintaining and extending these systems. Replace Perl with Visual Basic, or COBOL, or RPG-LE, and this statement remains true. > Rust on the other hand also has a bit of hype, but that > hype actually has a base. It is due to a features that > are quite significant, not because it comes from Mozilla. Longtime Rustacean here, and I slightly disagree. Rust does get a lot of boost from being backed by Mozilla. People are incredibly wary of investing effort in an unestablished language without full-time corporate backing. But yes, the awesome language semantics are enticing in their own right. :) > I believe that Rust actually really has a huge chance > to replace C and C++ (languages that were developed in > 70s and 80s respectively) and influence future languages. I definitely don't expect the world to chuck out C++ and rewrite it all in Rust, though I do expect that Rust will provide an enticing proposition for new systems programming projects that value memory safety while demanding zero-cost abstractions. My hope is that with Rust we can gradually move towards a world that is safer by default. Finally, I agree that Rust will be an influence on future languages. Just yesterday D proposed something akin to Rust's borrowed references (http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP69 http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP69), and I'm curious to see if something similar emerges in future editions of C++. There's also Microsoft's secretive M# language, which I suspect will use a similar mechanism.
- bastawhiz 12y ago
  I don't think it's losing traction so much as it's losing some mindshare to faster-moving projects like Go. JavaScript is moving forward (both in the spec and in the browser) and Node hasn't kept up at all. There's no 1.0 release in sight. ES6 is effectively absent from Node. V8 is around version 3.30, while the version in the build of Node that's in Homebrew is 3.14, which "is so old it doesn't even receive security fixes anymore". It's frustrating to get invested in a product if you know that it's got stagnant parts that nobody seriously plans to fix in the near-term at all.
- Dobbs 12y ago
  I can only speak from the perspective of my company. We had quite a few pro-node people. They wrote services in node. All of those node services have since been rewritten in Go by the formerly-pro-node people. Go has been much more manageable and powerful.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    What kind of services are they?
    - pearjuice 12y ago
      Hello World, a todo list and a blog application. After that we put "proficient experience with node.js" on all of our developers their CVs. Our company website now lists that we have "enterprise grade expertise with Node.JS" and I haven't even talked about the nodejs-rebranding of our social media dootprint (exclusively liking, following and interacting with nodejs content). We are basically swimming in nodejs client work now. So much, that we are considering splitting the company and having an exclusive branche for the nodejs playfield.
      - stephenhandley 12y ago
        #dootprint
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    Just wait 5 years they'll be re-written in Swift, Dart, Rust (other shiny new thing). The important thing is, it will probably be the same people doing it ;-)
    - Pharohbot 12y ago
      Really? Dart?
      - rdtsc 12y ago
        Is that not cool anymore. What's the next "cool" thing?
- TheRealWatson 12y ago
  Keep in mind that opinions on HN often do not reflect the situation in the general programming community. I think what we are seeing is a particular developer demographic performing their periodic migration. I'm referring to the group of developers that simply follow the heat possibly caused by some sort of anxiety or fear of being left behind. They did some Java, jumped to Ruby then Node and now Go.
dudus 12y ago
I can think of MySQL. While I wouldn't call it dead by any measure it certainly suffered when the spit happened.
- AustinG08 12y ago
  Since i'm a newbie and I couldn't find anything with a simple search, could you elaborate on that particular MySQL situation?
  - knd775 12y ago
    Original creators left and created MariaDB. MariaDB is now used in place of MySQL in most Linux distros by default. They left after Oracle got control over it by buying Sun (who had previously bought MySQL.)
    - Xorlev 12y ago
      For me it was the closed-source new test cases. That marked a turning point for the direction of MySQL (IMO).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - privong 12y ago
    The short version is that MySQL was acquired by Oracle (when Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems). Following concerns about it remaining open source, MySQL was forked by it original creator, and is developed as MariaDB[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - peapicker 12y ago
    Personally, I always though that the community over-reacted big time. After all, the core DB engine most people were using for MySQL for years (InnoDB) had been owned by Oracle for years before that. MariaDB has done some decent stuff, tho.
saidajigumi 12y ago
> is this just a typical example of spreading FUD? Whatever the outcome, this is absolutely eyeball-grabbing FUD. A popular open source project, by definition, has identified "job(s) to be done" and has attracted an audience of supporters (users and developers). That's what keeps any project afloat. In long-term, a big project fork is a sign of a healthy community. That community occasionally has to come to grips with the evolution of their software. For a fork, this is usually a combination of social and technical dynamics. In the short-term, it's hard to see past the difficult (and occasionally acrimonious) social mechanics.
smackfu 12y ago
A better headline would be: Future of Popular Coding Tool Unclear After It Splits in Two

Thaxll 12y ago

But it's true that Node is losing traction.

bhouston 12y ago
Node is losing traction where? I see it as being very strong, but it isn't the shiny new thing any more -- which means that it is beyond the first few stages of the hype cycle. It has very strong growth in Google trends: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js
- artursapek 12y ago
  I think Google trends is a very laggy indicator of something like this.
  - ocfx 12y ago
    Agreed
  - mbesto 12y ago
    No, but this is: http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django%2C+node.js%2C+angular.js%2C+ember.js&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby+on+rails...
cloakandswagger 12y ago
I see this more as a return to reality from Node.js's astronomical levels of hype. The use cases for a single-threaded web server are specific and limited in the real world. Node.js will continue to solve those use cases (simple web server for static content or I/O bound apps) but the resultant decline will lead some to believe that the framework is dying.
- bhouston 12y ago
  > The use cases for a single-threaded web server are specific and limited in the real world. We use Node.JS to run https://Clara.io https://Clara.io. Clara.io isn't at all a simple website. I think you are underestimating Node.JS's flexibilities and capabilities.
- tracker1 12y ago
  Perhaps you could name some website/app servers that aren't mostly i/o (or event-timing) bound? I wouldn't say the use cases are limited at all. You can always run multiple process instances, and communication between processes isn't really so different in practice than inter-server communication... Which just means you are scaling horizontally by design earlier in development.
  - cloakandswagger 12y ago
    I worked on some web-based project management software which was highly CPU-bound. A typical scenario would be the application querying a database for financial figures, doing a large amount of calculations on those figures and then generating an HTML report from them. I imagine any application with large amounts of business logic like this will be the same.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      Could you describe the sorts of calculations those were? Are these regressions or similar? Do PMs really look at that sort of thing? Maybe they were basing a TSP on the latest financial figures? b^) It seems possible that was a mostly IO-bound system, and the things which could have been conceivably CPU-bound should just have been batched and cached.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      I would suggest that what you are describing is the exception to the rule... Most queries, in such a case could either be done in the database or pushed to the browser... Generally if you're doing something CPU bound that isn't video processing or gaming, you push that out of process through a worker queue anyhow.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
qooleot 12y ago
By what, hacker news discussions? It seems here only "new" things are discussed, but not as much about platforms growing and stabilizing. Its almost like Rust and Golang have taken over the world if you measure by this community.
- takeda 12y ago
  My prediction is that Go will disappear in same way as it happen to Ruby, Perl and others. It currently rides on the fame that it comes from Google "so it hast to be good". It doesn't really provide anything revolutionary, it just is more friendly toward writing specific type of applications. Just by seeing that majority of people who are using Go are the ones who always explore new languages, and you see majority of people coming from dynamically typed languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP and others makes me convinced of this position. Rust on the other hand also has a bit of hype, but that hype actually has a base. It is due to a features that are quite significant, not because it comes from Mozilla. The ability to do memory safety checks at compile time is quite a big deal (maybe Rust is not first here to offer that, but it is first that it build the entire language around it). I believe that Rust actually really has a huge chance to replace C and C++ (languages that were developed in 70s and 80s respectively) and influence future languages.
  - kibwen 12y ago
    > My prediction is that Go will disappear in same way as it > happen to Ruby, Perl and others. Languages don't really ever disappear, they just become less trendy and therefore invisible to places like HN that revolve around hipness and novelty. Hell, when was the last time you heard about Perl? And yet there is an enormous amount of Perl out there powering systems the world over, and learning Perl will make you quite employable for maintaining and extending these systems. Replace Perl with Visual Basic, or COBOL, or RPG-LE, and this statement remains true. > Rust on the other hand also has a bit of hype, but that > hype actually has a base. It is due to a features that > are quite significant, not because it comes from Mozilla. Longtime Rustacean here, and I slightly disagree. Rust does get a lot of boost from being backed by Mozilla. People are incredibly wary of investing effort in an unestablished language without full-time corporate backing. But yes, the awesome language semantics are enticing in their own right. :) > I believe that Rust actually really has a huge chance > to replace C and C++ (languages that were developed in > 70s and 80s respectively) and influence future languages. I definitely don't expect the world to chuck out C++ and rewrite it all in Rust, though I do expect that Rust will provide an enticing proposition for new systems programming projects that value memory safety while demanding zero-cost abstractions. My hope is that with Rust we can gradually move towards a world that is safer by default. Finally, I agree that Rust will be an influence on future languages. Just yesterday D proposed something akin to Rust's borrowed references (http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP69 http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP69), and I'm curious to see if something similar emerges in future editions of C++. There's also Microsoft's secretive M# language, which I suspect will use a similar mechanism.
bastawhiz 12y ago
I don't think it's losing traction so much as it's losing some mindshare to faster-moving projects like Go. JavaScript is moving forward (both in the spec and in the browser) and Node hasn't kept up at all. There's no 1.0 release in sight. ES6 is effectively absent from Node. V8 is around version 3.30, while the version in the build of Node that's in Homebrew is 3.14, which "is so old it doesn't even receive security fixes anymore". It's frustrating to get invested in a product if you know that it's got stagnant parts that nobody seriously plans to fix in the near-term at all.
Dobbs 12y ago
I can only speak from the perspective of my company. We had quite a few pro-node people. They wrote services in node. All of those node services have since been rewritten in Go by the formerly-pro-node people. Go has been much more manageable and powerful.
- Kiro 12y ago
  What kind of services are they?
  - pearjuice 12y ago
    Hello World, a todo list and a blog application. After that we put "proficient experience with node.js" on all of our developers their CVs. Our company website now lists that we have "enterprise grade expertise with Node.JS" and I haven't even talked about the nodejs-rebranding of our social media dootprint (exclusively liking, following and interacting with nodejs content). We are basically swimming in nodejs client work now. So much, that we are considering splitting the company and having an exclusive branche for the nodejs playfield.
    - stephenhandley 12y ago
      #dootprint
- rdtsc 12y ago
  Just wait 5 years they'll be re-written in Swift, Dart, Rust (other shiny new thing). The important thing is, it will probably be the same people doing it ;-)
  - Pharohbot 12y ago
    Really? Dart?
    - rdtsc 12y ago
      Is that not cool anymore. What's the next "cool" thing?
TheRealWatson 12y ago
Keep in mind that opinions on HN often do not reflect the situation in the general programming community. I think what we are seeing is a particular developer demographic performing their periodic migration. I'm referring to the group of developers that simply follow the heat possibly caused by some sort of anxiety or fear of being left behind. They did some Java, jumped to Ruby then Node and now Go.

dudus 12y ago

I can think of MySQL. While I wouldn't call it dead by any measure it certainly suffered when the spit happened.

AustinG08 12y ago
Since i'm a newbie and I couldn't find anything with a simple search, could you elaborate on that particular MySQL situation?
- knd775 12y ago
  Original creators left and created MariaDB. MariaDB is now used in place of MySQL in most Linux distros by default. They left after Oracle got control over it by buying Sun (who had previously bought MySQL.)
  - Xorlev 12y ago
    For me it was the closed-source new test cases. That marked a turning point for the direction of MySQL (IMO).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- privong 12y ago
  The short version is that MySQL was acquired by Oracle (when Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems). Following concerns about it remaining open source, MySQL was forked by it original creator, and is developed as MariaDB[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- peapicker 12y ago
  Personally, I always though that the community over-reacted big time. After all, the core DB engine most people were using for MySQL for years (InnoDB) had been owned by Oracle for years before that. MariaDB has done some decent stuff, tho.

saidajigumi 12y ago

> is this just a typical example of spreading FUD? Whatever the outcome, this is absolutely eyeball-grabbing FUD. A popular open source project, by definition, has identified "job(s) to be done" and has attracted an audience of supporters (users and developers). That's what keeps any project afloat. In long-term, a big project fork is a sign of a healthy community. That community occasionally has to come to grips with the evolution of their software. For a fork, this is usually a combination of social and technical dynamics. In the short-term, it's hard to see past the difficult (and occasionally acrimonious) social mechanics.

smackfu 12y ago

A better headline would be: Future of Popular Coding Tool Unclear After It Splits in Two