[_pplp]

> This man was a senior developer

Dude, let's not be generous. Could he write code? Yes. But this is a guy who wrote everything in Node, but absolutely _refused_ to use any existing libraries except for ones he personally wrote. He didn't "trust" them.

He wasn't even hired on as a dev, he was hired to be the "Cloud guy", essentially a sysadmin for AWS, and basically spooked the CEO into giving him the keys to the castle.

[throwuxiytayq]

> wrote everything in Node, but absolutely _refused_ to use any existing libraries except for ones he personally wrote. He didn't "trust" them.

Sounds like the single sensible thing he did. Have you seen the npm ecosystem?

[kabes]

Are node apps getting way more hacked than say php or java servers? Was his code any better?

[Thorrez]

There are frequently posts on HN about NPM packages getting compromised.

Of the top 10 posts on HN about NPM in the past 30 days[1], 9 are about security problems, and last 1 is about package spam.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

[danielheath]

Node apps tend to depend on a far, far wider pool of maintainers.

To illustrate: A new Ruby on Rails app has 1/10th the number of maintainers in its dependency list than a new create-react-app codebase.

[dragonwriter]

A create-react-app app is not a node app (It has a node dev server, but it's a front-end JS app), so its a weird thing to reach for to illustrate a point about node apps.

[the_gipsy]

Why would you use node, if it wasn’t for the vast package exosystem?

[bborud]

Path of least resistance?

Picking a language (and possibly runtime) is a pretty huge investment if you intend to become proficient. A lot of people like to think that they are polyglot programmers and that language doesn't really matter. But it does. It takes a few years to become a decent programmer in a given language. And if people claim it takes just weeks or a couple of months, it really only tells you that they have very low standards.

If you are familiar with a given language, ecosystem and runtime, and you care about productivity and quality, the path of least resistance is to stick to what you know. Taking on a major project in a language you don't know is a risky proposition. In terms of quality, time, and even in terms of being able to deliver something acceptable.

I tend to have a main workhorse language. It typically takes 2-3 years to reach an acceptable level of comfortable familiarity with a new language. If history is any guide I tend to stick to the same language for 5-10 years. 5 years ago I switched from Java to Go. I mostly worked mostly as a manager at the time, which is why it took longer to reach what I think is an acceptable level. I'd say it is only in the last 18 months or so I've started feeling sufficiently competent in Go to call myself a Go programmer.

That being said: I think the JS space is both a poor technical choice and a poor career choice. The whole ecosystem is janky as fuck, you have to spend a lot of time dealing with silly complexity that tries to fix the jankiness, and the type of work you get isn't very attractive.

[tsimionescu]

It takes years to become acquianted with the library ecosystem of a given language. If you're going to write everything from scratch (especially in a language with an extremely bare-bones standard library), it takes maybe months to become proficient with any language in a paradigm you already know, save a few extremes (C++).