> The hyperbole in every criticism of Node must be there for a reason. I think it is more a reflection on the state of mind of the critic rather than the language.
"It's telling that none of the posts defending Node.js are talking about it's technical merits. They're all saying:
1. Attacks on people--you're being too negative, you're saying this to feel superior."
> JS is a safe, long-term bet. It's tentacles have made it into every platform and use case out there. Backend, frontend, embedded, mobile, desktop, etc.
By that argument, Java is a better language than JavaScript.
There are a lot of established languages that aren't going anywhere. And certainly with WebAssembly in the works, I'm not as confident that JS will be popular in two decades as you are.
On the prior point, from my experience there is a big confirmation bias at work and I think these discussions would go better if there was some disclosure of how invested each person was in their own language of choice. E.g. if you realised you could ship features faster in language X, how much wasted time would you have invested in language Y.
When I was working all Scala, I was always looking to confirm my decision by reading positive reviews, reading about the switchers from Ruby, because I was spending huge amounts of time learning it. This was right up until the point that I switched to Node and could ship features 10x faster.
I think people are always happy to read articles like this and see people switching away from Node if they are working in something trendy like Go. It feels good. But at some level there is a fear that the thousands of hours you spend on learning the intricacies of a language may be wasted.
Again, why not just stick to the technical merits here? Why accuse Node critics of trend-chasing?
I'm not a trend-chaser. Python has been around since 1991 and is my language of choice for most things. I like Elixir, but I wouldn't even consider using it at work, specifically because it could just be a fad. I'll keep an eye on it and maybe in 5-10 years consider looking for Elixir jobs if it's still growing.
There is a ton of technical experience which goes into me saying that Node is a flaming piece of crap. It's not just shipping features faster, it's how stable those features are, how many bugs you get, how secure your system is, how performant/scalable, etc. I have worked with Python and Node for years, every workday. Before that I worked in C#, Java, Ruby, Clojure--and it's exactly the experience of chasing a few trends versus using some old solid languages that makes me want to stick with tried-and-true tools.
Your post has a sense of "everything is relative, there's no such thing as one language being better" to it, but I don't think that's true at all. I think we can look at the technical merits of languages, compare those to the problems we have, and see which ones are better. And that's important because when we have the choice, we can choose to use the better tools.
"It's telling that none of the posts defending Node.js are talking about it's technical merits. They're all saying:
1. Attacks on people--you're being too negative, you're saying this to feel superior."
> JS is a safe, long-term bet. It's tentacles have made it into every platform and use case out there. Backend, frontend, embedded, mobile, desktop, etc.
By that argument, Java is a better language than JavaScript.
There are a lot of established languages that aren't going anywhere. And certainly with WebAssembly in the works, I'm not as confident that JS will be popular in two decades as you are.