Spyro7

I really do think that, as time wears on, we will see more of these incidents of people switching from Node to another, more familiar development environment. It seems to me that a lot of people started using Node simply because of the amount of hype that surrounded it, and many of these decisions were not as well researched as they should've been.

Reading through this gentleman's blog post, it seems that, originally, Node was chosen for just one reason – he wanted to develop the entire application in JavaScript. Other than this, it does not seem that he took the time to research the Node development environment before deciding to develop his application in it.

With respect to the author of this post, the testing environment and the ease of developing a CRUD web application are things that should have been looked into before a single line of code intended for production had been written.

In addition to this, as several other commentators have already noted, Node is not directly comparable to Rails. Node is basically an event framework and standard library that bolts onto JavaScript. Node would be more comparable to something like Python's Twisted or Ruby's EventMachine. The author was probably using one of the frameworks available in Node such as Express.js, Railway.js, or Geddy.

My apologies.

I never intended anyone to take the Discovery Institute paper as anything more than just a casual study of the subject (by a biased party). I certainly did not want to present it as academically rigorous on any level or as an unbiased look at the subject.

I thought that I had made this clear in my original post by using the word "study" rather than "research" or "peer-reviewed study". I really meant for it to be taken as more of a narrative account than an actual research paper. Unfortunately, it is now far too late for me to amend my original post to make this more clear.

In my defense, I typed up my post in a blaze of coffee-fueled self-righteous indignation. Mistakes tend to happen a lot when you shoot from the hip like that.

Every day, I start up a computer running OS X. Then, I proceed to fire up virtual machines for two Linux distributions, Windows XP, and Windows 7.

I occasionally play around with a headless system that I have running FreeBSD. Then I may power up my iPod Touch to test recent changes to my mobile site. I also do a significant quantity of work while I am logged into a remote debian server via ssh.

I doubt that I am the only developer with this type of daily routine. I actually do think that this poll is pretty nifty (and I checked off OS X), but I think that it is still worth observing that the term "primary operating system" just doesn't quite carry the same weight as it used to.

This graph is completely useless. It is looking at relative Google search query volume.

Of course Node.js search queries are rising. There is a lot of noise being made about the platform, the platform is relatively recent, and people are curious about it.

Of course Ruby on Rails search queries are falling. It has been out for a while, and people have become familiar with it at this point.

In other words, they don't need to google for Ruby on Rails when they can just go to one of the sites that they have bookmarked.

This is not a milestone by any stretch of the imagination.

I have to apologize. I fat-fingered the down vote when I originally meant to up vote your original comment. I think that my mistaken down vote was the one that initially sent your comment into the gray. This was unfortunate as yours was a remarkably civil post on a subject that can be somewhat controversial at times.

I am currently working on two projects written predominantly in CoffeeScript, and I completely agree with your original post. It is a mistake to think of CoffeeScript as simply another Javascript, and it is a mistake to make the assumption that people that are comfortable with Javascript will be comfortable within a CoffeeScript project.

CoffeeScript is more than just Javascript with a small sprinkling of syntactic sugar. There is a definite learning curve between Javascript and CoffeeScript. List comprehensions, extended regular expressions, and splats - these are just a few of the things that make up that learning curve. The changes in variable scoping that CoffeeScript makes is another.

I think that perhaps the best practice for publishing a CoffeeScript project should probably be to append a .coffee to the name rather than the usual .js. This would go a long way towards eliminating the kind of misunderstanding that you refer to in your OP.

Am I the only one that considers all of this ranting about Nodejs to be a little bit strange?

I would have never expected a post that was obviously a troll to prompt this much of a reaction on both sides of an issue. That so many of these rants and counter rants made it to the front page of Hacker News is somewhat discouraging.

I have been playing around with node for a few months, and I have tried to stay completely out of this "conversation". With that said, I would like to contribute just a few points:

Bad programmers will be bad programmers regardless of the tools that they use. If they use node and fail to write code that is completely non-blocking, then that is what we call a teachable moment. There is no magic button, all technologies have downsides and tradeoffs.

People keep talking about how nodejs is not good for computationally intensive tasks, but v8 is not a slow environment. Am I the only one that puts computationally intensive tasks into a queue to be taken care of by a pool of seperate processes? I am only just getting into web programming, and it seemed fairly obvious to me that you would not put something like that into your main event loop.

Also, if you find that you must put something computationally intensive in your main event loop, then you should use something like node-proxy or nginx to proxy those requests to a number of "nodes".

Over and over again, I have seen that people complain that node is not a good multithreaded environment. Well, yes... That is the tradeoff of using something that is closely tied to the concept of the event loop.

If you are using node because you feel comfortable with threads and you need threads, then you are making a serious mistake. If you are a new programmer and you are using node because someone told you that it is cool, then you are making a serious mistake. If you are using node because you have a problem that can be solved or addressed with an event loop and you understand the tradeoffs inherent in this approach, then you are doing the right thing.

To use nodejs effectively will often require rethinking your approach to fit the tool that you are using.