“Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry” (2012)
There is an easy sense of superiority that comes with derision of &quot;X&quot; and the authoritative sounding romanticization of idealized &quot;Y&quot; seemingly adds weight to the argument. Clearly  these &quot;Y&quot; people are smarter and better than all those &quot;X&quot; people.<p>Look at all this horrible code! So sad that all these people are not as smart as me. Look at this horrible language! So sad the people that created it are not as intelligent as me!<p>Really? There is no more &quot;problem&quot; with Node.js than there is a &quot;problem&quot; with any other platform. There is no more problem with JavaScript&#x2F;ES-(name your flavor) than there is with any programming language. Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Sometimes people who appreciate them call these &quot;tradeoffs&quot; or the superior types call them idiotic.<p>The cliche´ of hacker news haters is really really really getting old. So here are some things that are actually good.<p>As much of a pile of hot steaming code as it is, Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool. Of course you can do this in other places but its featuring prominently in the JS community leading to an interesting result. The language and its features become configurable, easy to adapt and change and evolve over time and suit to your liking. This is interesting!<p>Finally as opposed to what others may have said about the community being childish I have found the opposite. I find it to be very welcoming and supportive, friendly and honestly creative. Of course there are lots of negatives, lots of horrible code, lots of mistakes happening. But what is missed in all of this? Theres A LOT of stuff happening that is good even great! It&#x27;s beautiful chaos! So go on hating, but I see lots of great stuff out there. As one great systems and iOS developer told me the other day &quot;Have you tried Express? Its awesome!&quot; HA yeah. But he just tried it, and loves it!<p>Oh but look at that callback YUCK! Cmon