News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:After a year of using Node.js in production by Silhouette on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:49PM (#11623200)
For what it's worth, I don't think Lisp is a very convincing example of how useful a language with a limited type system can be, because to a first approximation no-one uses it.

But more generally, the modern web development world is only just waking up to the idea that if you want to build software sensibly beyond a very small scale, you need tools for modularity and composition. Separation of concerns is important to preserve developer sanity and keep maintenance manageable. It is helpful to have well-defined, stable interfaces, whatever the current underlying implementation. Having an expressive language is good, but having an expressive language built on sound foundations and with consistent patterns and clean semantics is much better. Standards for protocols and formats are important. Performance matters, in many different ways. Quality matters. Portability and standards compliance matter. Longevity and stability and backward compatibility matter. Having a few good tools that work well and offer substantial benefits is much more valuable than having a million tiny things that change or become unsupported within weeks. Frameworks can be useful for getting going quickly, but you lose flexibility down the line if your requirements evolve beyond what the framework was designed to support and that can hurt. Libraries offer more flexibility, but you often incur overheads converting to and from their conventions and those overheads need to be reasonable if the library is going to be useful. Reuse is good but not always the best choice.

These and many other lessons in real world software development were brought to you by the words "developers older than", the number 30, and experience of programming outside the JS bubble. :-)

Re:After a year of using Node.js in production by auvrw on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @10:11AM (#11713764)
> to a first approximation

late reply, but something occurred to me to say more as a (hopefully funny) witticism than an actual talking point:

if we approximate usage in terms of a poly sum w/ coeff derivatives wrt time (Taylor series is the word, I think) then one might estimate lisp to be a very much used language