[MatthewPhillips]

This is just not something that happens in real life. You know what functions are going to be async up-front, and likely make them async even if you don't know, just in case. Since all IO in js is async by default, having a code that does a simple calculation and introducing IO into it is actually a very big change that warrants the refactoring you'll be required to do.

[rdtsc]

> This is just not something that happens in real life.

You never change code in real life? You don't always know what functions are going to be async up-front. They might become async later, 4 levels down, when someone decides to do some IO. What happens then? Exactly. You have to ripple that code all the way up to the top of the API.

[daleharvey]

This is definitely something that happens to me a lot in real life.

And there isnt some magical point at which a change becomes large enough that it warrants a refactoring of unrelated code just because of the control flow.

[gruseom]

It's happened to me in real life. When you want to go from keeping a value in external storage to keeping it in memory, you've gone from async to sync. The reverse happens too. These are not huge conceptual changes. When they require restructuring an entire program, it's reasonable to wonder why that program's structure is so brittle. "Likely make them async even if you don't know, just in case" sounds to me like an admission of this problem. Why would I want to make an in-memory lookup async, thus forcing it to wait in the event queue and defeating the purpose of RAM? The only reason to do that is that the programming model imposes a large complexity tax for not doing it.

Consider the simple case where one wants to look up a value synchronously if one has it in memory, and go get it from storage asynchronously if one doesn't. That's a natural thing to want, but it's problematic in Node. The problem is not syntactic—you can easily write a function that calls back immediately in the one case and asynchronously in the other. It's that sync and async semantics don't compose well, so when you start to do anything a little complicated (e.g. launch N requests and call back when all N have either returned or failed), the two trip over one another. Working in a Lisp that compiles to JS, I had to write some surprisingly complex macros in order to get correct behaviour. I wouldn't dream of writing that JS code by hand.

[fzzzy]

Are you serious? This happens in real life all the time.