Uriel hates Node.js

Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry in recent times, a whole generation of programmers are being taught the worst of all ways of doing concurrency, in a system that doesn’t scale either in performance or project size and with one of the languages most plagued by pitfalls ever created.

JavaScript was already painful enough in the browser, why on earth anyone ever thought it was a good idea to use it on the server boggles the mind.

We will be paying the price of this misguided hyped fad for decades to come.

Of all the ways of doing concurrency, callbacks are by far the worst, Twisted was plagued by them and is the main reason why it failed, and that was with a much more sane and reasonable language like Python (stackless Python was a much better alternative and used a model similar to Go’s CSP).

And the sad thing is that there are much better alternatives around with much more sound models and environments, Erlang and Go are the two obvious examples, and that is for the highly specialized situations where you have great concurrency needs, for any other problem anything else will be much better than Node.js, even PHP.

– uriel, in response to Why Node.JS is absolutely terrible, by Hasen el Judy

Even Ryan Dahl hates Node.js

I hate almost all software. It’s unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer. At best I can congratulate someone for quickly and simply solving a problem on top of the shit that they are given. The only software that I like is one that I can easily understand and solves my problems. The amount of complexity I’m willing to tolerate is proportional to the size of the problem being solved.

In the past year I think I have finally come to understand the ideals of Unix: file descriptors and processes orchestrated with C. It’s a beautiful idea. This is not however what we interact with. The complexity was not contained. Instead I deal with DBus and /usr/lib and Boost and ioctls and SMF and signals and volatile variables and prototypal inheritance and C99FEATURES_ and dpkg and autoconf.

Those of us who build on top of these systems are adding to the complexity. Not only do you have to understand $LD_LIBRARY_PATH to make your system work but now you have to understand $NODE_PATH too - there’s my little addition to the complexity you must now know! The users - the one who just want to see a webpage - don’t care. They don’t care how we organize /usr, they don’t care about zombie processes, they don’t care about bash tab completion, they don’t care if zlib is dynamically linked or statically linked to Node. There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit will be trashed. We can flush boost and glib and autoconf down the toilet and never think of them again.

Those of you who still find it enjoyable to learn the details of, say, a programming language - being able to happily recite off if NaN equals or does not equal null - you just don’t yet understand how utterly fucked the whole thing is. If you think it would be cute to align all of the equals signs in your code, if you spend time configuring your window manager or editor, if put unicode check marks in your test runner, if you add unnecessary hierarchies in your code directories, if you are doing anything beyond just solving the problem - you don’t understand how fucked the whole thing is. No one gives a fuck about the glib object model.

The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user.

– Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, in a controversial post that has since been deleted from Google Plus

Rob Pike’s comment on the deleted Google Plus post:

Node.js community hates itself

Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community (related: HN thread)

Farewell Node.js