You know, ryah; I like your work ethic, I like your enthusiasm, I think you're a cool guy and it's great your project has so much traction.
But you say things like this and it worries me. Because a lot of people look up to you and either you said this because you feel defensive about your project or you said it because you genuinely don't understand the cases we're talking about here. And this is a problem because a lot of people look up to you and what you say, so when you say something as baffling as this response, you run the risk of leading a lot of people astray.
I was sort of at a loss for how to reply in the time I have to spare for Hacker News, but thankfully Aphyr did for me. But let me clarify what I said a bit, since I was a bit terse: The problem Node.js has is a social one. A lot of node hackers take the stance, "I thought Node.js solved the problems threads presented," (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/eVBOYiI_O_A/kv6iiDyy9...) like there is a single axis of superiority and Node.js sits above the methods that came before. But the reality is that Node.js is really just another possible implementation in the Ruby/Python/Pike/-Perl-¹ space, and shares most of the same characteristics as those languages.
So you have a lot of people who are aces at front-end programming in the browser thinking they have a uniformly superior tool for tackling high-performance server problems, but really they don't have that; they just have a tool with familiar syntax. And so they fearlessly (and perhaps admirably) charge into the breech of platform programming without realizing that the way people scale big projects involves a lot of tools, a lot of thought about failure modes, and a lot of well-established algorithms with very specific tradeoffs.
And so this is Node.js's problem. It's just another gun in the gunfight, but its community thinks its a cannon. In a world where high-performance parallel VMs like Java or Erlang have very powerful and helpful languages like Clojure or Scala on top, we're in a funny situation. It becomes increasingly difficult to justify all these GIL-ridden implementations of languages.
Which is not to say these implementations don't have their place (and Node.js is hardly the first javascript implementation outside of a browser), but increasingly they are losing their place in the pieces of your code expected to shuffle data around efficiently in the backend of modern distributed applications.
¹ Correction, perl 6 doesn't plan share this behavior. What I read suggests it's not done yet.
But you say things like this and it worries me. Because a lot of people look up to you and either you said this because you feel defensive about your project or you said it because you genuinely don't understand the cases we're talking about here. And this is a problem because a lot of people look up to you and what you say, so when you say something as baffling as this response, you run the risk of leading a lot of people astray.
I was sort of at a loss for how to reply in the time I have to spare for Hacker News, but thankfully Aphyr did for me. But let me clarify what I said a bit, since I was a bit terse: The problem Node.js has is a social one. A lot of node hackers take the stance, "I thought Node.js solved the problems threads presented," (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/eVBOYiI_O_A/kv6iiDyy9...) like there is a single axis of superiority and Node.js sits above the methods that came before. But the reality is that Node.js is really just another possible implementation in the Ruby/Python/Pike/-Perl-¹ space, and shares most of the same characteristics as those languages.
So you have a lot of people who are aces at front-end programming in the browser thinking they have a uniformly superior tool for tackling high-performance server problems, but really they don't have that; they just have a tool with familiar syntax. And so they fearlessly (and perhaps admirably) charge into the breech of platform programming without realizing that the way people scale big projects involves a lot of tools, a lot of thought about failure modes, and a lot of well-established algorithms with very specific tradeoffs.
And so this is Node.js's problem. It's just another gun in the gunfight, but its community thinks its a cannon. In a world where high-performance parallel VMs like Java or Erlang have very powerful and helpful languages like Clojure or Scala on top, we're in a funny situation. It becomes increasingly difficult to justify all these GIL-ridden implementations of languages.
Which is not to say these implementations don't have their place (and Node.js is hardly the first javascript implementation outside of a browser), but increasingly they are losing their place in the pieces of your code expected to shuffle data around efficiently in the backend of modern distributed applications.
¹ Correction, perl 6 doesn't plan share this behavior. What I read suggests it's not done yet.