Node.js has jumped the shark
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.