Just to show how Github watchers correlate to real-world popularity, my now-defunct programming language Reia is the #3 most watched Erlang project on Github, ahead of projects like Riak and RabbitMQ:
Looking at that listing the more amazing stat is that twitter bootstrap is #3. That was just released a few months ago and is "simply" an html ui framework. I think this highlights that over anything else, what most developers really need is a solid web ui to get started with.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but Bootstrap is also relatively unique.
We've had css frameworks before, but they were usually concerned with letting you position things along a grid structure.
The great thing about Bootstrap is that it provides you with a full complement of UI "widgets" that look reasonably good, filled in a page chocked full of examples.
We have a good designer on staff and so we were slowly starting to build something along these lines, but standardizing on Bootstrap has saved such enormous quantities of time I can't recommend it enough. I've used it on two or three projects already and it makes me happy inside.
Yep, we also use Bootstrap quite heavily for the web-based business apps we build for our clients. Makes it easy to build standardized and pretty interfaces.
Previously we were following jQuery UI themes, but Bootstrap is better in that it provides very nice defaults for many different types of content.
100% of my jquery-ui experience can be summed up with "I don't know why this is so hard and why is this so ugly? Ugh, I just want this plugin to work already."
Bootstrap on the other hand is a great way to go from 0 to "For something that a developer slapped together this looks really clean and composed" in no time flat.
It just shows that people hype on everything and follow like sheep - doesn't matter if they need particular project or not. Developers are no exception it seems...
FWIW, I think Node is a great way to teach, explore, and learn JavaScript without the browser. It helps me learn modern JS techniques quickly. But Node powering my web-server? Like Rihanna...
PS: Check out this free online book: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ big props to the author. He's done a great job teaching modern JS.
No, Rihanna does not respond to HTTP verbs. But then again, that's what young teens/early adults listen these days with less appreciation of music.
Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Rihanna. C'mon now. What has come to the music industry?
I thank Ted Dziuba for knocking the wind out of Node a bit. It puts some perspective and questions to a lot of people's head when it comes to how to use Node.js. Props to him for taking time explaining the important bits.
Rails community was off the chart when it comes to cockiness back then so I suppose it deserves the hate.
1. Thirty years ago, this dutch novelty pop act charted #1 in the US Billboard charts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bGQ1-Gmoso (watching it now is kind of great, actually)
2. In much the same way I tire of Node people claiming it's The Best Thing Ever because it has the shiniest Cargo[1] I also can't stand people who hate things purely because other people like it. You hate them because they have the shiniest Cargo.
I'm sure it has a purpose and it solves problems. I'd much prefer to discuss its technical merits, though. (Note: this was not an invitation to discuss its technical merits in this thread)
For the record: I don't hate Node.JS as I am using it to explore JS. I'm glad CommonJS exist to introduce common standards to JS (modularity, OS APIs, etc) so I can write JS outside browser.
I am with you that I'm tired to see people pushing NodeJS. But I suppose am even more tired to see people working on some simple web app using NodeJS and pretend that it's Gold. I prefer to see people get better in fundamental concepts as oppose to keep hack-job and move on to the next thing.
I'm tired to meet with people in my day job that keep pushing for the latest tech.
"For the next project we must use JavaScript and NodeJS" or the "I can cut most of the LoC if we were to use JS". Only to hear that "Yeah, I'm not too sure, I just have a gut feeling that we could do with less LoC" after I drilled them as to "why it'll be less LoC? How can we solve X component with JS and its current libraries? How can we test Y automatically and efficiently?"
I'm tired to interview people that put in their resume "I know NodeJS" but flunk fundamental computer science aptitude.
I'm tired to hear "you know, if we re-wrote this bits with Rails, it'll be _MUCH_ better".
For these people, their Java skill is "decent". Their Ruby skill is "decent". Their JS skill is "hey I just read JS The Good Parts and this is how Crockford sez we should write JS" yet still missing the structure, the discipline, the "write for readability not for meta-programming"
Too many Learn-Yourself-24-Hours Ruby programmers out there. Too many Learn-Yourself-24-hours-me-too JavaScript programmers out there.
Ok, enough rant for Saturday morning :) Good day everybody.
A lot of HN stories are there to tell us what is fashionable and what is not. If it weren't for stories like this, how would I know what technologies to use! </sarcasm>
I often fork repos to remind myself that I want to contribute to it, but then don't find the time to get started on it. I can imagine there being more people doing that.
I think this is a little sad. Pragmatically, NodeJS is great. But the only reason it's popular is because browsers only run one (deeply flawed) language.
Yeah seriously. The be all end all of languages has yet to arrive. Language and programming is an art, not some maximist metric. The Mona lisa is as flawed as JavaScript and every other language that exist.
I guess someone in the Rails community could create a similar project and say "OK guys everyone go follow Rails on GitHub."
I have no issue with the technique as businesses do this all the time... encouraging customers to Like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, etc. Perhaps this a hacker version of social media marketing... who needs Facebook likes, let's get Github followers.
It's my project and it's purpose wasn't to beat Rails follow count, really.
As you can see, it uses knockout.js and this is why I wrote it - I wanted to learn this library and to study whole client-side rendering and templating concept a bit.
It's also my first project using bootstrap.css.
It was a fun thing to hack on.
Of course, I'm happy that node.js has more followers than RoR, simply because I like node.js more than RoR. However, lets not make it a big deal. These are just numbers.
https://github.com/languages/erlang