Comment by GnarlinBrando | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GnarlinBrando | Hacker News Reader

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That is sort of like saying a smart phone is not new technology. In a sense it is not. It is the combination of two already existing technologies, but isn't that pretty much what all new technologies are? On top of that it is a new language and each language is going to be better or worse at doing certain tasks. It is also frequently more beneficial to actually learn something for yourself.

As for your second point, client side programming (GUI in general) is very event driven so a lot of people coming to node because they have javascript experience have event driven programming experience. And as far as I know (I may just be ignorant of it, and would love to know if I am wrong) there is no go-to text on event driven frameworks, nor has there been anything as popular as node that has been so focused on events besides tcl/tk which there isn't really a wealth of readily accessible knowledge about.

Again, I could be totally wrong, but unless you can point towards where someone working with node can learn these lessons I am gonna go on ahead thinking that node and it's community are doing well. There is after all a wealth of community driven documentation and tutorials being assembled already. I would hazard a guess that the amount of information available to someone new to node is more robust than many older frameworks/languages/programming technologies in general.

No, there are sometimes genuinely new technologies: ideas or frameworks that have not been previously explored. Google's PageRank algorithm is a good example. It's not often that you see genuinely new ideas in programming languages, although it does happen occasionally. Javascript as a language doesn't push any boundaries, although it's an alright language overall.

I don't know what books would be best to learn event driven programming. That would be a good question to have an answer to. My point in suggesting a book is that it's the concepts here that matter, not that you are using a Javascript, Python, Ruby, or C# implementation, or a language built around the idea like Erlang. Once you know the concepts, you can quickly and easily pick up or even build a framework in any language.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Node and the community isn't doing well. It's just that many of us are quite confused by the massive hype around it. Javascript might be a fine choice in some situations, but in general, on the server side you have many different languages to choose from and many (most?) of them also have competent event driven frameworks available. It would surprise me if most development shops didn't have server side developers who work daily with a language other than Javascript.

Most technologies are made up components of older technologies or ideas, I am not saying that you cannot do something genuinely new. But I am also sure that if you talk to the guys who built pagerank they probably had some inspirations and stuff they took ideas from. It is all perspective.

I agree its the concepts that matter, it is just that whenever I hear this argument no one (who is making it) can actually point out exactly what those concepts are or even point to any reason why another event driven framework would be better (besides the obvious I already know the language gambit which applies to node equally, if not more). Many people cant even point out the obvious frameworks that do similar stuff, with maybe twisted being the exception.

I would be incredibly surprised if even a handful of dev shops have server side devs who only work in node. But I don't really see what that has to do with anything.

I get that this is mostly about the 'hype,' but if Node and the community are doing well, have good documentation and we are seeing the technology used to implement some cool stuff (trello for example) then how is the hype confusing? That is the thing that I don't get. Node is now a cross-platform environment that fits easily into PaaS and SaaS concepts, is gaining hosting options by the day (heroku, azure, etc) has a huge library of third party modules, and the majority of people using it seem to understand what it is and is not. It seems obvious to me that any new technology, or new implementation of a technology if that makes you feel better about the terminology, that has all those things going for will generate a certain amount of hype.

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