[ludwigvan]

Straight from the horse's mouth:

"Node is popular because it allows normal people to do high concurrency servers. It's not the fastest or leanest or even very well put together - but it makes good trade offs in terms of cognitive overhead, simplicity of implementation, and performance. I have a lot of problems with Node myself - but the single event loop per process is not one of them. I think that is a good programming model for app developers. I love Go so much (SO MUCH), but I cannot get past the fact that goroutines share memory or that it's statically typed. I love Erlang but I cannot get the past the syntax. I do not like the JVM because it takes too long to startup and has a bad history of XML files and IDE integration - which give me a bad vibe. Maybe you don't care about Erlang's syntax or static typing but this is probably because you're looking at it from the perspective of an engineer trying to find a good way to implement your website today. This is the source of our misunderstanding - I am not an app programmer arguing what the best platform to use for my website--I'm a systems person attempting to make programming better. Syntax and overall vibe are important to me. I want programming computers to be like coloring with crayons and playing with duplo blocks. If my job was keeping Twitter up, of course I'd using a robust technology like the JVM. Node's problem is that some of its users want to use it for everything? So what? I have no interest in educating people to be well-rounded pragmatic server engineers, that's Tim O'Reilly's job (or maybe it's your job?). I just want to make computers suck less. Node has a large number of newbie programmers. I'm proud of that; I want to make things that lots of people use. The future of server programming does not have parallel access to shared memory. I am not concerned about serialization overhead for message passing between threads because I do not think it's the bottleneck for real programs." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4310723

[rdtsc]

> The future of server programming does not have parallel access to shared memory.

Yeah but it could be IO parallelism. There could be two instances of callback chains of sequence C1->C2->C3 started such that the the second starts before the first one finished. As in C1->C2 ran then C1 gets called again. If in those callbacks you update a data structure (a database record?), you now accessed that data in parallel. So you have to protect against that with some kind of a lock/mutex. Yeah context switching doesn't potentially happen at every assembly instruction, the granularity is much higher, but it is still there.

[dllthomas]

There's some need to synchronize, but hot damn is it simpler when you're dealing with sensible blocks of high-level statements than when you're dealing with out-of-order parts of assembly instructions.

[swift]

That's true, but personally I still don't find this model ideal because the synchronization points are implicit. The cleanest concept I know of for dealing with synchronization is transactions.

[MichaelGG]

If you don't want shared memory... then don't use it. Other languages are not stopping you from copying objects and using a message passing system.

And it seems rich to complain about syntax when the language of choice has "function" as it's lambda operator.

[noelwelsh]

Such a wonderfully confusing and self-contradictory quote. I love it.

[tel]

Why do you think it's self-contradictory? I found it fairly stable.

I think the most important line for me is about wanting computers to be like lego blocks. I think that's an admirable goal and I think that if Node as a community of programmers and projects owned that more ("We're Mindstorms, not NASA, here!") it'd get a great deal of love from the rest of the community.

Sadly, that probably won't happen since Mindstorms sounds diminutive and no collection of people has an ego so in check.

[noelwelsh]

Here are some of the bits I read as inconsistent.

"Node is popular because it allows normal people to do high concurrency servers." vs "If my job was keeping Twitter up, of course I'd using a robust technology like the JVM." ==> So Node is not actually good for high concurrency servers?

"I want programming computers to be like coloring with crayons and playing with duplo blocks." ==> The wonderful wonderful thing about Duplo is it composes. Continuation-passing style (i.e. callback hell) is the paradigmatic example of a non-compositional whole program transform.

"Node has a large number of newbie programmers." vs "Node is popular because it allows normal people to do high concurrency servers." ==> Newbies are writing high concurrency servers?

"I'm a systems person attempting to make programming better." and "Node is popular because it allows normal people to do high concurrency servers." vs "If my job was keeping Twitter up, of course I'd using a robust technology like the JVM." ==> If Node isn't actually good for its intended use case how exactly are you making programming better?

[tel]

I guess that I don't feel these so painfully because I don't think Node is necessarily successful at it's goal, though I believe its goal is admirable. CPS might not be the most elegant way to schedule threads, but it is fairly simple which is one kind of boon.

I'm also pretty sure that high concurrency means a variety of things allowing a distinction between Node High Concurrency capability and Twitter High Concurrency need. If Node allows newbies to achieve higher concurrency than other newbie tools (PHP, Rails) then I think it can achieve that task to some degree.

[noelwelsh]

I mostly agree with everything you say. I think it's sad that so many in our industry use such poor tools. Racket, for example, is an excellent tool for beginners. The PLT group that produces it has long had a focus on introductory programming and has produced resources such as HtDP (http://htdp.org/) and Bootstrap (http://www.bootstrapworld.org/) yet Racket is far more capable than Node, Ruby, and the like.

[tel]

Complete agreement... A world where Racket was in browsers instead of Javascript would be wonderful.

[Dewie]

> I am not an app programmer arguing what the best platform to use for my website--I'm a systems person attempting to make programming better.

What is a "systems person", in this case? I guess it makes sense if you know who it was who said this, but I don't. Is it a programmer working with code for servers?