I think what this really gets at is that callbacks are a shitty concurrency primitive.
They certainly make sense from an implementation perspective (I've got this interpreter and I want to do concurrency... I know, I'll just use it to trampoline callbacks).
But callbacks are too low level to reason about easily to some extent, it's kind of like writing everything as a series of goto statements. Sure you can do it, but good luck following it.
The advantages of asynchronous execution are lost. This isn't limited to nodejs, I've experienced similar problems with Python twisted...
Channels (such as in clojure/core.async) or lightweight processes and messaging (such as in erlang/beam), are much more enjoyable to work with.
This shouldn't really be a shock, however, they're higher level abstractions based on real computer science research by people who really thought about the problem.
They certainly make sense from an implementation perspective (I've got this interpreter and I want to do concurrency... I know, I'll just use it to trampoline callbacks).
But callbacks are too low level to reason about easily to some extent, it's kind of like writing everything as a series of goto statements. Sure you can do it, but good luck following it.
The advantages of asynchronous execution are lost. This isn't limited to nodejs, I've experienced similar problems with Python twisted...
Channels (such as in clojure/core.async) or lightweight processes and messaging (such as in erlang/beam), are much more enjoyable to work with.
This shouldn't really be a shock, however, they're higher level abstractions based on real computer science research by people who really thought about the problem.