Mistakes Node.js Developers Make, or a critique of Node.js?
The whole notion that node.js (or Python's Twisted) makes everything more efficient by putting you in an event loop is just a cop-out for not having something more intuitive like blocking semantics with an evented I/O scheduler.
Or you use Play/Akka and don't think about threads. Or Scala streams and don't think about threads. There's not much thinking about threads going on here. (A major reason why Go just makes me shrug is that I already have its good bits within easy reach on the JVM if I want them, and I don't have its bad bits.)
> If you work in C++, there is no "easy" way, and you have to think about it if you want non-blocking IO.
YMMV, but I don't find boost::thread_group and Boost.Asio terribly hard.
Also, you omitted C#, which has some pretty fantastic asynchronous tools that you don't have to think about at all.
And Akka is perfectly usable in Java.
When management decries usage, it's almost always because they're running a cost/benefits analysis and the costs of using X (including writing language bindings for code, training programmers on the team, hiring new programmers for the team, context switching between multiple languages, and dealing with bugs and corner cases that have been encountered and fixed by other people in more mainstream languages) outweigh its benefits. Many of these costs are invisible to the engineer who originally proposed using X.
But the "repair" I was referring to is that a developer can leave rather than put up with conservative silliness if they so choose (and personally, I do, my last gig was a Scala one and so is the next). Java shops are not so rare as to be irreplaceable and any shop seriously worried about hiring somebody who can work with systems that are by now fairly well-understood isn't going to be a good place for any decent developer's career.
*Anything available in other languages in place of callbacks (promises, generators, async await etc) is also available in node. If you are using callbacks you are just ignorant (or don't want to deviate from out of the box features in which case node is the worst possible thing for you). Nowadays there is not even a performance benefit so the only credible reason to use callbacks is not even there.