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JavaScript Is Eating The World (dev.to)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In case you haven't heard the news, JavaScript and NodeJS are single handedly eating the world of software. NodeJS is an Open Source server-side JavaScript environment based on the V8 JS rendering engine found in Google Chrome. Once only thought of as a "hipster" framework, NodeJS is fastly becoming one of the most commonly used languages in building web applications and is beginning to find its way into the Enterprise. Netflix, Microsoft, PayPal, Uber, and IBM have adopted the popular "hipster" server-side JavaScript engine for use inside high traffic, high profile production projects. Java still powers the backend of Netflix, but all the stuff that the user sees comes from Node. In addition to Node, Netflix is also using ReactJS in their stack. PayPal too is moving away from Java and onto JavaScript and NodeJS for use in their web application platform. Uber has built its massive driver / rider matching system on Node.js Distributed Web Architecture. IBM has also embraced NodeJS as well. Even Microsoft has embraced NodeJS, offering direct integrations into their Azure Platform, releasing a wealth of tutorials targeted at Node and they have even announced plans to fork the project and build their own version of Node powered by their Edge Javascript engine instead of Chrome's V8.
When Webassembly gets access to the dom, the Javascript craze will begin its decline.
There are some aspects of Node that are really nice though, mainly the ease of use of the CLI. If that were combined with a better security system and less feature churn, it would be great.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Its a great framework. Development is fast. Deployments are even faster. Testing is easy... Sure, Javascript is far from the fastest language, but in our context we delivered many more tools and services than we would have in Java, Php or .NET.
Its not perfect of course, but for us the benefits far outweighs the disadvantages. Long live NodeJS.
Decode your health
JavaScript is the main programming language for the browser.
Normally making a Web Application you often need to program in many languages.
SQL for the Data Layer
PHP/Java/C# for the Business/Logic layer
JavaScript for the Interface Layer
HTML for the interface
NodeJS is JavaScript, so you can cut down on the number of languages you are using for a Multi-Tier Application. This can allowed shared libraries across both sides Say your complex data validation check that you put on the Browser Side (as the UI layer needs this to keep people from keying in stupid stuff) then use the same code on the Logic Side, to double validate the data in case someone disables javascript on their browser.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It was a troll, surely you must have caught that when he suggested replacing C code with JavaScript... It's bad enough that people have wedged Java code into the domain of C. A scripted language like Perl or Ruby can actually be used to achieve similar performance for some use cases by someone who has a little understanding of how those languages are actually implemented and gain some advantages in terms of development speed and easier integration with the systems side scripting and applications that tend to be developed in house. Java is just a POS that corporations bought into because it was backed by a large commercial effort and JavaScript is just nasty.
Very true. Ruby was (and still is) an awesome language at a conceptual level. Even though Ruby's runtime engine is slower and behind more established/popular scripting language engines like Python, I still strongly prefer using Ruby over any other language for writing utility scripts. It never made much sense for web server logic though (unless it's a small internal web server intended for very light traffic). IMO Rails was the worst thing to come from Ruby, but most developers using it were too wrapped up in the hype to notice.
JavaScript+Node seems like the opposite (e.g. a crappy language with a superior runtime engine). I like the async nature of it, though it drove me nuts when I needed to chain together multiple queries to respond to a single page request. That probably means I was "doing it wrong", but I was just getting my feet wet with it. ;-) It also bugged me how easy it was to make the Node.js engine lock up and crash. Maybe it's just the specific version I tried (which was about a year ago), or maybe it's only when Node.js is compiled for Windows, but a single Ruby script with 20-30 threads performing a speed test on a Node.js "Hello World" page brought it down in 30-60 seconds (though it did run impressively fast until it crashed ;-).
It's too bad Perl 5 has fallen on the popularity scale. Node was better for async code about five years ago but now Perl has some amazing modern async systems and if written properly is lightning fast. Every time one of these new upstart languages has a feature or advantage Perl just absorbs it. Sadly, most of the Perl code you actually see is written because it is the lowest common denominator which means not using any new functionality and sometimes not even having access to CPAN. Non-blocking async code with websockets scaling to tens or even hundreds of thousands of connections, no problem for actual modern perl. Perl has been around for so long though that someone trying to pick up Perl is going to find a lot of old cruft out there showing old ways. Hell there is even a book called "Modern Perl" that is hopelessly ridiculously outdated.
JavaScript isn't even a real language. Sounds like you've written in other languages... be honest, if written without a style convention Perl can look ugly but JavaScript actually IS ugly. You might get the job done in JS but you feel a little dirty afterwards.
It's comical to see JavaScript fanatics go on about how great JavaScript is because it supports limited support for asynchronous programming.
They really don't have any idea how limited JavaScript is in this respect compared to pretty much every other modern and quasi-modern programming language out there.
Ask them what "multithreading" is and they'll give you a blank stare!
C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl and even Ruby programmers can't believe how naive and ignorant JavaScript programmers are about this matter. It's like these JavaScript fanatics really don't understand how limited their preferred language is.
I'm primarily an embedded/kernel developer, and I've been using C for decades. Normally I'm pretty strongly in favor of using C. But I readily admit that you can throw together a project in NodeJS very quickly. There isn't much revolutionary about NodeJS, other than it is packaged nicely and is easy to use. When the primary purpose of writing software is to solve problems, getting something going in short order has value.
I grew up on BASIC, but JavaScript is so ubiquitous and is not terribly hard to learn that I would recommend it as a first language over anything else. (Ideally you should learn multiple languages as you advance, as they each have their own advantages and quirks)
PS - I have a fondness for FORTH that may never go away, even if I will likely never again get to use it in a professional project. R.I.P. OpenFirmware
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Javascript *is* the wrong way to go, but C really needs to be replaced with a language that can check for fence-post errors, and where you can tell when a value is a pointer rather than an integer. (Note I said "can'. This should be a compiler switch so that you can optimze the check away after everything is debugged.)
Somehow every new language seems to try to be an improved C++ rather than an improved C. This is a mistake. And improved C is just as needed as an improved C++...and would be a lot easier to do. You could even have it be almost the same as C, with most programs being identical between the two, and with the same meaning. But you can't call it C, because it would severely break many standard C idioms. And D's been used for a reasonable C++ replacement. Perhaps concentrate on making it easily debuggable and call it "ecstaCy". (That should be searchable for on the web.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's pretty much what Rust is: a low-level language that can be slotted into the same places C is used now, but without all the undefined behavior and memory leaks. And since it's a new language, it can have features people expect in a new language these days (like type inference, an intelligent build system, etc.).
Ita erat quando hic adveni.