Node.js is not a cancer, you are just a moron

My tone is going to seem strangely even and un-ranty. This is because I am doing everything I can to keep myself from completely exploding when I read this bullshit that this moron is spewing. OK, that was a little ranty, but the rest will read evenly. Maybe.

So one of my programming friends posts an article at http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html and says, “Ah, here’swhat’s wrong with Node.js!”

The article is rather strongly written – “Node.js is Cancer”, “node.js nonsense”, “Node.js is a tumor on the programming community”, “completely braindead”, “Scalability disaster”, etc.

He then shows a Fibonacci sequence and how it performs badly under node.

The problem he has proposed is, fundamentally, CPU-bound. I wrote a version of it in C and it did perform faster than it did in Node, but still, the problem definitely took finite-time. My command-line Node.js version calculated the answer in 8 seconds, the C version did it in 4. I was rather impressed that Javascript (Node.js’s V8 engine) was able to come as close to C’s performance in pure CPU-bound execution.

The problem, and what the author perhaps misunderstands, is that this is not the situation in which Node is an ideal solution. I use Node.js in production for work – and I know of many other shops that do too. If the problems you are dealing with are CPU-related, Node.js will not help you. Node.js works well when your problems are I/O-related -e.g., reading something out of a database, running web servers, reading files, writing files, writing to queues, reading from queues, reading from other web services, aggregating several web services together, etc. The reason that this solution has become so popular of late is because these are the types of problems that are most common in web development today. Thus, node.js becomes a helpful arrow in one’s quiver with which to solve these types of issues.

Considering that the article’s author seems to have some level of experience, I wonder if his choice of skewed example was perhaps deliberate. He has other articles on his blog about other event-loop libraries. His comment at the bottom – “tl;dr – Node.js is an unpleasant software library and I will not use it” – is possibly the real source of his anger. And – an irrefutable point – if you don’t like something, you don’t want to use it, and he obviously doesn’t. That’s fine.

Node is a tool; one of many – no panacea. If you’re dealing with problems of ‘slow’ services that need to wait for various bits of I/O to complete in order to return a result – it can be a very powerful and useful tool. If you’re computing the fortieth member of the fibonacci sequence recursively, it won’t be.

The sad fact is that the author’s completely valid point – that Node.js isn’t a good tool for CPU-bound problems – is completely buried in his bile. This is because he never states that, explicitly. Node.js has other drawbacks as well – it’s very easy to end up in callback-spaghetti, it’s very minimal, and it’s very very very young. The database integration libraries have some pretty serious immaturity issues to work through; and I’ve had to code around a good deal of that.

It’s a tool that’s good at particular things, and I will continue to use it for those things. Those ‘things’ tend to be the bulk of what web development and web services development actually are. So when I can write a two hundred line program that can replace entire arrays of servers and interconnected services with just one server; I am going to do that, and I won’t feel particularly braindead in doing so.

转载自：http://uberbrady.com/2011/10/node-js-is-not-a-cancer-you-are-just-a-moron/

My tone is going to seem strangely even and un-ranty. This is because I am doing everything I can to keep myself from completely exploding when I read this bullshit that this moron is spewing. OK, that was a little ranty, but the rest will read evenly. Maybe.

So one of my programming friends posts an article at http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html and says, “Ah, here’swhat’s wrong with Node.js!”

The article is rather strongly written – “Node.js is Cancer”, “node.js nonsense”, “Node.js is a tumor on the programming community”, “completely braindead”, “Scalability disaster”, etc.

He then shows a Fibonacci sequence and how it performs badly under node.

The problem he has proposed is, fundamentally, CPU-bound. I wrote a version of it in C and it did perform faster than it did in Node, but still, the problem definitely took finite-time. My command-line Node.js version calculated the answer in 8 seconds, the C version did it in 4. I was rather impressed that Javascript (Node.js’s V8 engine) was able to come as close to C’s performance in pure CPU-bound execution.

The problem, and what the author perhaps misunderstands, is that this is not the situation in which Node is an ideal solution. I use Node.js in production for work – and I know of many other shops that do too. If the problems you are dealing with are CPU-related, Node.js will not help you. Node.js works well when your problems are I/O-related -e.g., reading something out of a database, running web servers, reading files, writing files, writing to queues, reading from queues, reading from other web services, aggregating several web services together, etc. The reason that this solution has become so popular of late is because these are the types of problems that are most common in web development today. Thus, node.js becomes a helpful arrow in one’s quiver with which to solve these types of issues.

Considering that the article’s author seems to have some level of experience, I wonder if his choice of skewed example was perhaps deliberate. He has other articles on his blog about other event-loop libraries. His comment at the bottom – “tl;dr – Node.js is an unpleasant software library and I will not use it” – is possibly the real source of his anger. And – an irrefutable point – if you don’t like something, you don’t want to use it, and he obviously doesn’t. That’s fine.

Node is a tool; one of many – no panacea. If you’re dealing with problems of ‘slow’ services that need to wait for various bits of I/O to complete in order to return a result – it can be a very powerful and useful tool. If you’re computing the fortieth member of the fibonacci sequence recursively, it won’t be.

The sad fact is that the author’s completely valid point – that Node.js isn’t a good tool for CPU-bound problems – is completely buried in his bile. This is because he never states that, explicitly. Node.js has other drawbacks as well – it’s very easy to end up in callback-spaghetti, it’s very minimal, and it’s very very very young. The database integration libraries have some pretty serious immaturity issues to work through; and I’ve had to code around a good deal of that.

It’s a tool that’s good at particular things, and I will continue to use it for those things. Those ‘things’ tend to be the bulk of what web development and web services development actually are. So when I can write a two hundred line program that can replace entire arrays of servers and interconnected services with just one server; I am going to do that, and I won’t feel particularly braindead in doing so.