=> 👽 ivanodin

Just a rant: node.js and everything above it should be abolished from the planet. Thanks and Happy New Year. 😂

2 weeks ago · 👍 shway, prk, hanzbrix, dk, m0xee

Actions

=> 👋 Join Station

18 Replies

=> 👽 the_tricky_trout

I totally agree! But what are the alternatives? I have been thinking HTMX + Go backend? Go seems dedicated to not making breaking changesl]. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 lucifer_jehovah_smith

@darkghost My joke is that I've got some Perl code lying around here that is old enough to run for the US House of Reps and still runs with no or minimal changes on the latest and greatest Perl 5. It's not far from the truth. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 darkghost

Building on quicksand is a very apt description. I don't know how anybody keeps up these days. But I grew up writing ANSI C, which would probably still compile unchanged 25 years later. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 lucifer_jehovah_smith

@m0xee I think you've pretty well summed it up with the "building on quicksand" comment. I've done commercial stuff in Python and a bunch of hobby stuff too, but nowadays, I tend to worry about what's going to break with a minor bump like 3.11 to 3.12. Go found its niche: mostly server-side web apps. To both of their credit, I do find Python and Go to be readable languages. It's fun to rant in any case. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 m0xee

@lucifer_jehovah_smith

Because they are attempting to use it for everything and the kitchen sink, things always keep changing — the way you use the tooling gets different, things in the standard library keep appearing out of thin air and getting deprecated at an absolutely crazy pace… This is one of the things I absolutely hate about modern computing: it's like building on quicksand, you have to always keep learning just in order to keep using old tools — that or you have to stop updating, that's considered bad from security standpoint, but there is no other way: there are no stable things, there are current and outdated 😖 · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 m0xee

@lucifer_jehovah_smith

And either of them won't be as bad (except for JS probably 🤭) weren't they moving too fast — which is the natural outcome of the kitchen sink mentality: every language has to be used in every possible field and has to support every paradigm and programming style — in case someone tries using your language and doesn't find thing familiar from the other language.

Okay, Rust and Go are relatively new — they are still looking for their niches and maturing, but Python? I've been using this language both commercially and form my own things, but every time I give it another go I do not recognise this language. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 lucifer_jehovah_smith

I pretty much hate all the languages popular in 2024. JS: reasons obvious and all over this thread. Go: babby's first programming language; Rob Pike tells us that it was made for Googlers, whom he claims aren't very bright. Rust: ocaml with shittier syntax, a kitchen-sink mentality, hard depends on LLVM, and moves too fast. Python: burned lots of good will with that 2 to 3 thing, makes breaking changes on minor versions, star chambers ban core devs for nothingburgers; the children are running the daycare center. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 hanzbrix

@m0xee It seems Microsoft is also riding that coattail now, as them and Google are the main founders of the JS foundation. Run away! 😂

It seems Deno is built on the same problematic v8 engine and Bun is just... worse. So maybe it is just time to sunset JS. 😂 · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 m0xee

@hanzbrix @darkghost And in addition all that shitshow is riding on the coattails of Google as Node itself is based on V8 — there were attempts to port it to SpiderMonkey and ChakraJS (old Edge's JS engine), but all of them failed. So if Google doesn't like your architecture enough (which I suspect might be the case with RISC V) or outright hates it (which is the case with Big Endian PowerPC, Node simply doesn't exist for 32-bit PowerPC anymore), you are royally fscked 😩 · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 hanzbrix

@darkghost Did not know it was owned by Github and therefore Microsoft. 🤮 · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 darkghost

npm is owned by Microsoft 😱 · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 hanzbrix

@darkghost Exactly this, plus nobody should have been using a library for left pad. That, kik and a bunch of tother stuff, just speaks volumes of the idiocy involved in the npm "community".

@prk It's sadly what you get when you force backend people to become "fullstack", data is data! · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 prk

Javascript is an aberration. It was just some quick untested feature thrown at Netscape to make stuff move on a HTML page. Now most sites don't even offer HTML but JS-generated crap. Talk about accessibility...

NodeJS is even worse: how to get rid of half the dev team by making an excuse for a language the defacto industry standard for everything. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 darkghost

Left-pad was a fiasco. A library that did something small and simple was removed to protest corporate involvement in free/libre and open source software. The aftermath broke many small mom and pop platforms such as Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and PayPal. Dozens of ultra wealthy shareholders saw a blip in their net worth for a short time and it was a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare. Controversially, the library was republished against the author's wishes and now all authors have less control over their contributions to npm. It was started after a company, Kik, asked the author of left-pad to rename previously released package, also called kik. npm forced transfer of kik to Kik. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 hanzbrix

@user999 An illustration of how dumb? We had a pad left library, that every major library depended on, when it was pulled, a lot of packages died. What is pad left? One line of code, to pad 0 to the left of a number...

Other shenanigans include typescript, which is an abstraction layer that makes your code a lot slower, so you don't have to learn actual JS. 😂 · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 hanzbrix

I primarily code in Node.js... But I very much agree. 😂 Happy new year!

@user999 It isn't so much frustrating, a lot of it just appeals to the lowest hanging fruit, so a lot of the eco system is well... stupid · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 user999

Node.js was on my lofty list to learn some distant day in the future. I wonder what wonderful frustrations await me. · 2 weeks ago

=> 👽 ivanodin

I will confess that I kinda like next.js, the only problem being the whole ecosystem surrounding it. · 2 weeks ago