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Comment by filipedeschamps | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: I'm seeing a lot of innovation coming from Node.js projects, some of them useful, some of them not, but even though when not, they're really creative.

I'm new to programing and I'm wondering if this happened in the past for other technologies when they were released. Did they reached the same spectrum?

Best regards.

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I'm curious what you mean by that. This is basically a wrapper around the iMessage SQLite database – it could equally well have been implemented in Ruby, or Python, or Go. Projects like this always seem to be implemented in whatever environment the developer wants to use, which is great, but not really relevant.

I don't see any particularly interesting innovation from Node.js projects when compared with any other similar community.

I know what you mean when something could have been implemented in X, Y, or Z language, but I too, have noticed some really interesting projects in Node.js.

One of my favorites is torrent-mount. It allows me to use virtual machines directly from a torrent stream, rather than first downloading the entire vm.

https://github.com/mafintosh/torrent-mount

JavaScript happens to be hip-of-the-day language.

For example, torrent-mount's idea isn't something novel. It was voiced[1] and implemented[2][3] a number of times before, and the links are what I got just by a single Google query. It's just that Node is a trending platform today (although some may say it's popularity peak had passed already), so the surrounding chatter's more active and thus you're likely to find out about those.

Or, possibly, there's even some bias like when you're looking for interesting projects on resources where JS-favoring people gather.

[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.fuse.deve... [2] https://github.com/rkfg/BTFS [3] http://btslave.sourceforge.net/

I've been programming since the early 2000s and I would say that Node's growth/popularity is unmatched. There are a combination of things that makes that a reality though: you have JavaScript's growth on the back of what Google shown Ajax could do, then you have Github, then you have Nodejs itself which allowed more people to participate because of the "ease" of JavaScript.

From my vantage point, Node is poised to replace Java as the write-once, run anywhere platform. Well, as long as that platform has Webkit running.

Reading SQLite database is innovation?

Well, I can't answer your question. What I can say is I found this thread on Hacker News first page.

Other languages certainly had their share of creative hacks.

But I think Node's packages are coming in at a faster rate, and they're more publicized.

NPM has a very innovative approach to package management

How so? Nothing about it has struck me as being particularly unusual.

Node uses hierarchical dependencies so different dependencies can get their own version of a particular package. I'd agree that this is hardly innovative, but definitely a lot more user friendly than Ruby. npm is great but would agree that attributing Node's popularity to it is unfounded.

It's a blessing and a curse. When a package is tied to a buggy version of a dependency, it's not a lot of fun to try to get the upgraded version in without either forking your dependencies or trying to get everything fixed upstream.

On the flip side, it is nice when (compared to ruby) you have two dependencies that depend on incompatible versions of the same library.

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