[brianwillis]

Every generation has its war.

My forefathers fought the great war of emacs and vi in the 1980s. Those were dark times, which many still refuse to speak of. When I think of the horrifying atrocities committed by both sides, the snarky BBS posts, the bickering over usenet, it shudders the mind.

My generation got off relatively lightly. There were a handful of skirmishes during the browser wars which were difficult on the civilian population. Tables being used for layout, limited CSS support, that sort of thing. While many a fine web developer met their end at the hands of Internet Explorer 6, a lot of us (some would say, the less patriotic) chose to ride out the war as desktop application developers, avoiding the draft entirely.

Today I see many of the young and impressionable being manipulated in an ardent search for desperate glory. They get roped in by blog posts, conference talks, friends and coworkers who are too young to remember the atrocities of old. I fear this generation's war will soon be upon us. It will not take place in mobile as many had expected (the Android/iOS battle was a classic case of corporate manipulation), but instead will be fought in Java Script.

[zanny]

> friends and coworkers who are too young to remember the atrocities of old

I'm 21. If I'm working on a project, I'll use whatever the guy paying for it wants. If I get a choice, I'll use what I'm most experienced in.

There is no magical solution at the end of the rainbow. The only real important consideration is that 99.9999% of code you will write has already been written and is probably open source somewhere. A lot of that ends up in a library. And a lot of that is still maintained to this day. So rather than look for a framework to reinvent the wheel in as quickly as possible, relearning the entire stack every time (or at least the framework, which I find takes the longest just because it constitutes huge amounts of library functionality and dictates the workflow) is almost always a waste of effort.

In my defense, I have experienced the "reinventing of the wheel" many times that didn't work or caused a lot of unneeded growing pains, starting probably with Netscape 6, but more recent examples are Gnome3, KDE4, a lot of switching between wxwidgets, gtk, qt, and efl over the years, and the duplications of work associated with them, even if I am young in the profession.

[gedrap]

Oh come on, don't get that defensive! There certainly was some humor in the parent post's style.

[jmspring]

Funny how so much of todays "wars" center around Javascript at the front end or bringing it down into lower levels/the back end -- nodes, etc. I like to refer to it as the era of the "Webscale Wars"...in homage to the awesome Mongo/Node webscale/rockstar bad ass tech videos.

Missing in a lot of this is that many of these tools that allow for "X is OMFG so amazingly awesome and webscale and ..." is years of churn, some progress towards "standards", and a foundation in lower level languages that enable these technologies.

In the gold rush, those that sold the shovels, the jeans, and the food made the bigger, less riskier dollar. In the coming generational war, as you posit, if it were to occur, having a toolset that includes things beyond Javascript will be key. In seriousness, especially on the nodejs front, any serious application you develop will run into bottle necks...in nearly 99% of those cases, just javascript isn't going to get you out of them. Breadth in experience, tooling, and mindset has it's advantages.

[hackula1]

As someone who would whole heartedly identify himself as a node dev, the most valuable code I write is in python. Node and JS in general is great for "glue code", but at the end of the day, most of us need to have something to actually glue together. Dependencies play a huge role in this. In my case, python has far better support for GIS, analytics, and machine learning. For 90% of us, scaling is not really ever an issue. Typically the real question is, does language X have library support for Y functionality.

[6cxs2hd6]

> I fear this generation's war will soon be upon us.

At IO 2013 I saw someone leaving the Angular session.

I did a double-take.

His name badge: Kyle Reese.

[dustingetz]

Yes, thank you. There are a lot of very loud, authorative and dismissive opinions from people who clearly don't understand all the other ideas in this space.