Your comments about the annoyingness of async are real.
BUT
Just because you want to do ABCDE does not mean it's feasible.
You can access a file, read it, compute something, depending on that access another file, read it, write something via Http Post somewhere else.
BUT the nature of i/o is such that the problem is 'intrinsic' - it's not a 'node.js' problem so much.
Of course you know that you can do everything syncrhonously if you want, but then you get hangups and what not waiting for underlying resources, networking calls etc..
The nature of a distributed system is inherently async, and so we have to live with it.
That said - maybe you have some examples of where async definitely should not be used?
The other huge problem with Node.js is the vast, crazy expansion of tiny libraries, supported by ghosts, that change all the time. A simple lib can depend on a dozen others, with varying versions, everything changes almost daily. A small change somewhere can really jam things up.
This is by far my #1 concern, although it can kind of be avoided if you're careful.
> Just because you want to do ABCDE does not mean it's feasible.
Every single language is able to do ABCDE, except for JavaScript. Yes, I guess that means it's impossible.
> The nature of a distributed system is inherently async, and so we have to live with it.
The nature of a distributed system is the one you impose onto it by design. Computer systems are not something that appear at nature and we just harvest.
There are plenty of synchronous architectures for distributed systems, from distributed logical clock ones, for clock domain ones. People tend to avoid async ones anyway.
BUT
Just because you want to do ABCDE does not mean it's feasible.
You can access a file, read it, compute something, depending on that access another file, read it, write something via Http Post somewhere else.
BUT the nature of i/o is such that the problem is 'intrinsic' - it's not a 'node.js' problem so much.
Of course you know that you can do everything syncrhonously if you want, but then you get hangups and what not waiting for underlying resources, networking calls etc..
The nature of a distributed system is inherently async, and so we have to live with it.
That said - maybe you have some examples of where async definitely should not be used?
The other huge problem with Node.js is the vast, crazy expansion of tiny libraries, supported by ghosts, that change all the time. A simple lib can depend on a dozen others, with varying versions, everything changes almost daily. A small change somewhere can really jam things up.
This is by far my #1 concern, although it can kind of be avoided if you're careful.