[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.