For instance, nulls are clearly a problem. After countless rants we're seeing languages that have better ways to deal with missing or optional values enter the mainstream (Swift, Scala, Rust).
J2EE's original idea to configure a system through separate XML files was heavily criticised for being too bureaucratic. After countless rants we got configuration by convention, better defaults and annotations as part of the source language.
Of course progress is not a straight line and quite often it's not clear what is and isn't progress because there are many trade-offs. But where would we be without a constant process of criticising our tools?
1. Has no adequate threading model.
2. Has no reasonable type system.
3. Has better alternatives on the server side.
...you're making it personal, and about the people. Look at your post; you're just accusing the critics of Node of feeling "intellectually superior". That's just an ad hominem attack. And you think that critics want you to rage quit the internet and give up? No, that's not what critics of Node want. Or at least, that's not what I want.
What I want is for people to either acknowledge the problems with Node and fix them (unlikely), or start using better alternatives on the server side, and start investing more in WebAssembly and langauges targeting WebAssembly, so we don't have to use JavaScript any more. I want this because as long as Node/JavaScript are around, I have to either deal with those horrible tools, or not take those jobs.
This isn't about feeling superior, it's about improving my life by using tools that aren't godawful.
2. Typescript is great, it even has strict null checking via union types. Way better than the half-hearted attempt at optional typing you’ll find in Python 3. So if you think Python is a good ecosystem, then node is miles better. Sure, it’s not Scala, but on the other hand interop w/ Javascript and Web Platform is seamless. It’s a trade-off, but one that I think is very much worth taking. Also it compiles in seconds, not hours.
3. You can share code w/ client which is actually useful considering web app logic is moving client-side. See: React.
4. WebAssembly is nowhere ready. No idea if using it/tooling/debugging will be any good for anything other than what emscripten enables right now. It’s a very risky investment to be considering that early.
Even if you think WebAssembly will pan out, the languages that will target it already target Javascript. It’s just alternative bytecode, really.
[1] http://tc39.github.io/ecmascript_sharedmem/shmem.html#Struct...
2. JS's duck typing is thought to be a "feature" to some and a "bug" to others, so if you think it's a bug, use TypeScript or Flow. They'll give you "reasonable type system[s]"
3. Nice opinion
Process spawning and threading are two different but related mechanisms. The former is much more expensive and hard to use with optimization techniques like pooling. It also forces message passing for IPC rather than shared memory.
> 2. JS's duck typing is thought to be a "feature" to some and a "bug" to others, so if you think it's a bug, use TypeScript or Flow. They'll give you "reasonable type system[s]"
Nothing that transcompiles into JavaScript can fix JavaScript's lack of a native integer.
No clue what the performance implications would be for really heavy uses of this, but it'd at least be a workable solution if you absolutely required a true integer type at run-time.
The emitted code might have lots of "|0"s in it, but I don't see many people complaining about the beauty of their C compiler's generated object code and the lack of native anything-other-than-integers.
What are the performance implications of that? It's basically adding an extra operation. Also, having been one to dive into intermediate assembly from time to time, there certainly are people who complain about the obtuseness of object code. Particularly since the generated object code is (out-of-order execution notwithstanding) how the CPU is going to actually execute the instructions.
> the lack of native anything-other-than-integers
Um, what? C has native floating-point types on every platform with an IEEE-754-compliant FPU, and probably on some that don't as well. Pointers are also not integers, though bad programmers frequently coerce them into such because most compilers will let them.
Really, who cares? Types are important for the programmer not for the compiler. If I know what I'm doing then lack of ints doesn't concern me.
I'll bite on this. Javascript's type system is with no question my favorite part of it! JS's object model is incredibly powerful, which is why ES6 classes are implemented basically as syntax sugar, and why so many languages can be transpiled to Javascript.
I also don't think that the lack of threading is as much of a problem as you might think it is. For one, it means you can sidestep a lot of the data ordering problems that you get in a threaded environment.
There's no question that Javascript has shortcomings, but so many of the problems that happen in Javascript come from people treating it like Java, when it's a lot more like Lisp. In many ways, the architecture of Javascript revolves around a very simple, powerful object model in a way that's tough to parallel in most other languages.
I'd actually like to list the worst things (IMO) to happen to the software industry.
(1) Marketing of computers at boys resulting in a generation of girls being excluded. (2) Software patents suffocating innovators. (3) DMCA & international equivalents (4) Daylight savings time. (5) A generation of programmers being taught that anything other than "OOP best practice" was heresy
I'm sure there are plenty I'm missing.
Does one particular programming environment deserve to be listed with that stuff? Personally I think it's a pretty ludicrous suggestion.
It's always annoys me whenever programmers complain about time zones and daylight savings time, because of the difficulty and inconvenience handling them in software. It's getting things backwards. Software should model the (human) world* ; the human world shouldn't be changed to model what's most convenient for software.
* That doesn't mean you can't have a simpler model that you translate to/from.
Agreed, but my point is that daylight savings time is a huge human-world complexity that brings a marginal boost to some sectors. There are a ton of negative effects and I question whether there's a net benefit, even before all the software complexity needed to support it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Dispute_o...
Heres a pretty good video from computerphile on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
For example, if you want an event to happen in 12 hours, and it happens to be 9pm the day before daylight savings time, do you schedule it using the timezone-aware API (so it happens at 9am, which is actually 13 hours away) or 8am (which is 12 hours, but non intuitive)? What about the event that's supposed to happen every 12 hours in perpetuity?
What happens when the user/device is mobile, and crossing timezones? Which times do you use?
What happens when you're scheduling something far in advance, and then the timezone definition itself changes (as happens a few times a year) between the time you scheduled the event, and the time something actually is supposed to happen? Does the event adjust for the new definition or follow original time?
Luckily for many problem domains, the details around this don't matter too much, but this is just the tip of the iceberg with timezone challenges.
E.g. a rather trivial example of displaying a hourly graph/table of some measurement, including comparison with yesterday (because there are daily patterns of fluctuation).
DST means that some of days have 23 hours and some days have 25 hours. The libraries will help you make the relevant calculations, but now you have to make a decision wether the comparison that you make with "yesterday equivalent" of today's 11:00 is yesterday's 11:00 (23 hours ago) or yesterday's 10:00 (24 hours ago).
For another example, accounting of hours worked - you may have a person that has worked 25 hours in a single day, such events break some systems.
See also: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
This year, Azerbaijan decided to cancel DST, and agreed the cancellation just 10 days before the scheduled clock change [1]. Egypt cancelled DST with even less notice - just 3 days! [2]
[1] http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/no-dst-azerbaijan.html
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/06...
It is also just one of many geographical, cultural, and temporal challenges that need to be addressed by any business system relying on accurate international dates and timing.
Rants get me down. It really is possible to be constructively critical. This author failed.
A bad rant is usually just impotent rage without wit.
What his rant misses is that most technical decisions aren't made on purely technical merit for a host of different reasons.
I would say that it is based on a subset of the technical dimension. Maybe Erlang and Go might have nicer ways to handle concurrency flows but if it doesn't have a library X to communicate with backend component Y then there is a technical reason not to use it.
Now as much as this worldview is flawed, this is just one of the manifestations of an attempt to make software development easier, which is, of course, a noble goal that even Node.js aspires to.
No they are not. They are a state of an object. What is the problem is a lack of documentation.
One thing I've seen coming up, at least in some code I've looked at, is the @Nullable and I've not seen any complaining about null from those who use this tag.
The idea is to always document when a variable or type can be null. This way you know, with 100% certainty (given a strict type system adherence) that you're not going to erroneously see a null object where it isn't expected.
From this, you have a huge benefit: a performant error state or a better method of representing an issue without throwing an exception.
Riddle me this, how would a Map be implemented if Null was stripped from Java? Should it throw an exception if a key is not found? If that is the case, then you should always need to check for this exception, otherwise you're prone to bugs. You've also increased the execution time of your code by in some a huge performance hit [0] that is more cumbersome.
This is why I think rants are a big problem. They don't describe the opposition to a statement accurately. They are one person's opinions and after reading them, if it all sounds nice, you're usually willing to take it all as fact. "Hey, they're writing an article! They must be smarter then me. I'll take their word for it." As a result, our communities don't really evolve we just spew memes back and fourth dictating what someone else thought.
What really matters, in every sense, is reading a discussion had between two experts in opposing camps. That way you can see both sides of the arguments, their weak points, and make an educated choice on what side to agree with.
That being said, what do you think of my points? Can you address them? My oppinion is that NPEs can be easily avoided by using very simple measures AND null more closely resembles most problems while being more performant and less cumbersome then throwing exceptions willy nilly. I'd love to hear how you feel about this.
Also...
> J2EE's original idea to configure a system through separate XML files was heavily criticised for being too bureaucratic. After countless rants we got configuration by convention, better defaults and annotations as part of the source language.
I'd say that is a good example of discussion, brain storming, and coming up with a much more accurate representation of the ideas we are trying to convey (the use of annotations to configure methods).
I'm someone who uses @Nullable and complains about null, so now you've met one of us! The problem with @Nullable is that it's mostly useful when all your code uses it, but the compiler will not force you to do so. It is a Sisyphean task. (But at least Java has @Nullable - most languages with null don't have anything like that.)
In a parallel universe version of Java with no nulls, a Map implementation would return Optional.<Foo>empty(). This seems similar to null, but with uglier syntax, but critically, it is not of type Foo. In order to get a valid Foo, for instance to pass to a method that takes one, you must unwrap the Optional you have and if it is empty you simply can't call that method with a Foo because you don't have one. The advantage here is that this method taking a Foo now knows for sure it has one and does not need to bother checking that assumption. How pleasant!
Obviously you would use an Optional<T> (for a Map<K,T>)
See https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Optional...
Alas, the horse has left the barn.
Much like immutability: if it had been the default, with a "DANGER: mutation ahead" keyword required otherwise, that would arguably have been good. But it's too late, now. (Java) Beans, beans, the magical fruit...
But at least you can stick to just using Optional and no nulls in new code you write, and only using nullables to communicate with existing libraries.
When people say that null was a billion dollar mistake I don't think they were referring to any possible implementation of a value that indicates nonexistence.
Optionals.
map.getOrThrow(key)
map.getOrDefault(key, defaultValue)If a lookup fails, it is often a bug or a violation of a constraint that you shouldn't be handling. Throw an exception. If a lookup is expected to fail in normal execution, you can use an Optional to mash together a check and lookup in a typesafe way. Lookup failures should not be allowed to propagate as nulls only to be caught as NullPointerExceptions in disparate parts of the code.
Pretty much everyone does it, myself included, and it's one of the more problematic things when it comes to actually discussing languages. People just won't accept that their "baby" (or pet, as was mentioned below) might just be bad.
While elitism isn't great, not all criticism and ranting is done from a "We're/I'm better than you" perspective and most rants aren't directed at people. The people using language X might feel they are, but that's simply their own insecurity showing. I think a good portion of defensive posts show this fairly clearly.
In the end, is it really that surprising that some of the newer ideas are better than old ideas? Why is it only "fair" to say that a later version of X is better than an earlier version of X, but not that Y can be better than X?
From what I've seen and personally experienced, this happens most often when someone is only strong in that one language. If you've only ever used that language to build applications and someone comes along telling you it sucks, it feels like a personal attack because it would mean you've been doing things wrong or your code/applications suck. It's part of an identity. As people learn new languages and actually gain professional experience with them, that original language is no longer what defines them as a programmer so they no longer need to defend its legitimacy.
Generally you'd think new ideas would win out on old ideas. But you hope the new at least learns from the old. No need to repeat mistakes. This is the criticism I usually see from BSDs towards Linux or programmers towards Golang. Not that I disagree/agree, just an observation.
While I agree in principle, I've been bitten by some incredibly bad node packaging architectural decisions. Just yesterday I was attempting to install tfx-cli in order to CICD our build scripts to our build server - it went as you would expect with npm: MAX_PATH issues. The git clean then failed on all subsequent builds. A problem became unsolvable by virtue of the platform that was used to write it - had tfx-cli been written in almost anything else, this would not have been a problem (I say "almost" because I'm egregiously assuming that at least one other package manager is also broken in this way).
So there's an example of node-specific problem and there doesn't seem to be any impetus surrounding solving it.
> Oh but look at that callback YUCK! Cmon
In defense of Node, it now supports ES6: callback hell is self-imposed for all new code.
??? There's so little impetus around solving it that both sides(npm and Microsoft) have put in significant effort to do it - npm 3 reduced the chance of having a very large path, and preview builds of the .net file api are removing the MAX_PATH limit.
https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools/issues/69
https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejs-guidelines/blob/master/w...
Code merely pushes electrons around, meaning that it has constraints firmly rooted in physics. So no: NPM runs in a universe (regardless of OS) and fails to account for the constraints of that universe by falling into unbounded recursion far too easily. This could have all been avoided by correctly applying graph theory and/or prior wisdom in regard to dynamically loading modules - which has existed for decades. Now we're forced to kludge it with reparse/symlink and that only works on file systems with these features.
So really it's about what abstraction makes sense for the maintainers as well. Not just you.
The problem is there is no way to know years in advance what makes sense for those future people. All you have is current standard at your org and/or common sense. Do what they say.
When you choose what the standard is, select whichever makes more sense at the moment. That is kind of my original point.
There's also an easy sense of superiority which comes from being actually superior.
> There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform.
Well, yes, there are problems with Node.js, to include the concurrency model and the language — as indicated in the article.
> Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems.
Yes, every system has its own problems, but some systems have fewer or better problems than others, while others have more or worse.
There are continua of languages, platforms & OSes. JavaScript-the-language is a bad language. It's not as bad as INTERCAL, but it's worse than C or Lisp. Node.js-the-platform is a bad platform. It's probably not as bad as the Java platform, but it's worse than Go. POSIX is a bad OS. Not nearly as bad as Windows or Mac OS Classic, but worse than Plan 9.
One has a very limited number of hours in one's life. Why waste those hours in pursuit of anything other than excellence? Node.js isn't excellent; why spend any time on it?
I also agree with your conclusion that avoiding wasting precious lifetime on shi^Wnon-excellence is undesirable. However, given the first problem I mentioned, one can easily waste just as much time trying to figure out what the excellent things to choose are.
The thing that always bugged me about node is the argument that using the same tools on the server as in the browser is somehow an advantage. That idea is not a given.
Not a given, sure. But there's an argument to be made there, beyond the scope of mere programming, as a web-focused company can benefit from having a dev team that is versed on both frontend and backend.
There are not only two jobs: frontend and backend. Saying X language is good/bad for backend..
Nowadays I work as a backend developer using NodeJs and C#. I wouldn't use any of them for the former job and there are good reasons why I wouldn't use C++ for my current job. So there is such thing as right tool for the job even in one part of a web platform
I'm not trying to be obtuse here, I genuinely don't understand your request.
If you're going to address the "haters", actually address real complaints rather than make very vague comments about beauty and forum culture.
Liking any particular language doesn't make anyone a bad or stupid person though. Nor does preferring another make you better or smarter.
I don't think your rebuttal of a criticism as exhibiting a hater culture is any less cliche.
Until the disgustingly contrived artificial hype, and regular poorly-founded misguided hype are all derided too, the haters persist to balance the equation.
Or, to rephrase my point in a business-friendly way: garnter_hype_cycle.jpg
Their main purpose is entertainment.
Useful tamed animals like cows or horses are compared on much more practical indicators, and critique of a racing horse that "it's too slow and sometimes throws the racer off on curves" is reasonable.
That's why your pet metaphor wasn't applicable I think. also it involves emotions in misleading way. Programming languages won't feel bad when you don't use them.
Sure, cats and dogs are pretty good pets, say cats are Go and dogs are Lisp. That'd make C a ferret and JavaScript an incontinent chimpanzee with rage issues which periodically lays waste to the house, destroying anything breakable and slaughtering everything living.
Sometimes using a band saw to conduct brain surgery is just completely wrong.
It's pretty clear that COBOL would be a bad choice to write a multiplayer online game, and that JavaScript would be a bad choice for an operating system.
As for the far far more common scenario (the one I had in mind) of choosing whether one of Ruby, Python or Node.js might be better for a certain project, the choice between the three is often going to be fairly subjective. You could solve a lot of problems in all three quite well. Trying to decide which one is objectively the "best" is often a waste of time that could be spent actually solving the problem at hand.
Discussions that are prolonged like that become long because people are not actually being _objective enough_.
If you had an objective discussion about Python and Ruby you would conclude that yes, both of these languages have very broad ecosystems and are particularly suited for scripting (and glue work). Python is better suited for scientific computing, etc.
Nothing about the scenario you speculate about invalidates good discussion about programming languages and I don't know what about the scenario makes you think it does.
I agree - nothing invalidates good discussion on this topic. My point is that trying to decide the best programming language for a particular task (or trying to decide why one programming language is ill-suited) isn't something that always needs a perfectly objective answer.
Ok, I hear that. I agree that you have to find a local maximum to settle at in these things. It's about being reasonable and pragmatic, after all.
As a sidenote, Babel didn't invent compilers (yes, that is what it is called) or DSLs.
Javascript's type system really doesn't stand up well to scrutiny. That's more crucial than you'd think - the type system is the foundation the rest of the language is built upon.
I suspect this is partly why javascript cycles through technologies so often. The foundations are shaky.
Small wonder, then, that the Node.js ecosystem tends to very good at iterating quickly and testing out many alternative approaches to solving a problem, and pretty bad at communicating invariants to other programmers or providing a stable API for other programs to build off. You tend to get what you ask for.
JS has unfortunate implicit type coercions, bad scoping rules (not type system related but still crappy), and annoying tri-value silliness (NaNning all over).
I'm a big fan of prototype OO. JS not so much.
If you're about to say one of SmallTalk/Lisp/Python/Ruby, then no, they are good at prototyping but have all the pitfalls of Javascript when used on large teams. If you're about to say one of Java/Go, then no, you give up a lot of prototyping flexibility for their explicitness.
No, they absolutely don't.
>>> "1" + 1
Javascript: 11
Perl: 2
This is the kind of approach works ok for small programs. Where the code that does these implicit type casts isn't too buried.
When it's buried 3 layers down in a dependency used by a dependency used by a dependency, you want this to happen instead:
Python/Ruby: Type error
It does nothing to communicate invariants or guide API usage at design-time.
Consider PHP, which does have some of those bizarre and frustrating conversions, yet at the same time it also has stuff like type-hints and interfaces that can be used for design-time checking.
Literally what this entire thread is all about.
Lots of languages have this issue and it manifests in the instability and indeterminacy of large scale applications in Perl and PHP much as it does in javascript.
Type hinting is, honestly, a pretty poor way of dealing with the problem of turning "1" + 1 into 2, but that's a separate issue.
No it isn't, that's just what you've been fixated on. Please re-read nostrademons' post, because you aren't actually addressing the issues they brought up, namely:
> It's dynamic typing with a prototype-based object model. This type system [...] tends to be pretty bad at communicating invariants to other programmers or nailing down APIs for other subsystems to build off.
While it's true that Python "fails nicer" than JS, it addresses neither of those two issues about preventing failures.
I find that the big benefit of types are in documentation. They are executable, explicit, compiler-checked documentation of the programmer's intended usage. Without this, it becomes much harder to read through and comprehend a large codebase that was mostly written by other people. It becomes even harder to change it.
I like Python, I like Javascript - but they have their uses, and those uses don't include large-scale mature software engineering. I actually argued otherwise for my first couple years at Google (where both are used extensively, though the JS is largely statically typed), but eventually saw the wisdom of more experienced engineers in this, and relegated my Python to exploratory coding.
I guess companies should stop using Java for big enterprise applications with tons of dependencies. Or this isn't a problem because programmers usually know the basics of the language they are using. And if they don't, then that is the problem, not the language.
btw, Python: '1' * 3 -> '111'
Main.java:17: error: incompatible types: String cannot be converted to int
int z = x + y;
In theory I agree with this but in practise I see this so rarely used it barely matters.
see here: https://repl.it/Cqeq/0
But that's not really the point, crdoconnor seems to think that languages should throw an error in cases like this, not just keep the type of the first argument.
What concrete examples were you thinking of? (You didn't mention any strongly-typed-dynamic languages in your replies to the others.)
Javascript cycles through technologies quickly because web developers cycle through technologies quickly, and they do that because they get to work on greenfield projects with minimal expectation for them to be around in 5 years a lot. Check out all the different server side frameworks and infrastructure components that have been in vogue with web developers over the last decade.
In comparison, people who aren't writing consumer-facing websites and webapps tend to have much more clearly-defined goals, longer lifespans of their apps, and don't often get the choice to use anything but industry standard technology. Because of the slower cycle, there's less opportunity to redesign frameworks and core technologies even when it's allowed.
There's plenty more nonsense where that came from. That's just an easy to understand, concrete and obviously stupid example.
>Check out all the different server side frameworks and infrastructure components that have been in vogue with web developers over the last decade.
In python it's mainly been django and flask for a decade. In Ruby it's mainly been Rails.
Why do they have sticking power? It's partly cultural but it's largely because they were built on far more stable foundations.
In deployment, we've gone from SFTP scripts to Fabric-like software to PaaS to configuration management software to Docker, and then it seems every 6 months there's a different preferred way to make Docker do something useful. And of course there's the eternal argument over whether to deploy to VPSes, cloud platforms, or bare-metal hardware.
The "hip" web companies at any given moment - the ones who need the latest and greatest components to impress investors and attract "rockstar" "10x" developers - aren't tied to any specific language. They'll pick whatever was the most popular at the time they needed to pick something. Hence, right now, you have a whole lot of companies building on Golang and node.js, where they'd've been building on RoR five years ago.
> with Babel you can use TypeScript
To clarify, I'm certainly not implying this person is an idiot. I'm saying, they lean toward thinking that the typing system is more of a bad idea (idiocy) than a valid tradeoff.
I don't think typescript is necessarily the answer though. You don't fix the problems caused by weak implicit type casts with static typing, you do it by turning off weak implicit type casting and raising a lot more type errors.
It's not about being smarter; smart people are a dime a dozen. It's about the fact that what happens in the industry happens to all of us. When a large chunk of the industry adopts callbacks as their threading model, that means I have to either work with their horrible threading models, or not take those jobs.
Don't psychoanalyze people who you disagree with; that's just an ad hominem attack.
> Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. There is no more problem with JavaScript/ES-(name your flavor) than there is with any programming language. Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Sometimes people who appreciate them call these "tradeoffs" or the superior types call them idiotic.
This is the favored defense of people whose favored languages/tools are under attack. But this is absolutely not a tradeoff. A tradeoff is when you make a choice that has some downsides, but you get something for it.
With JavaScript in the browser, the tradeoff is clear--you use this shitty awful language and you get to run your code on the browser, because that's pretty much the only reasonable way to run your code in the browser right now. There are alternatives (TypeScript, CoffeeScript) but then you're limited to a smaller community with fewer resources.
But with JavaScript on the server, there's no tradeoff. You use this shitty awful language and you get... a shitty awful language. You don't get a reasonable threading model, you don't get a reasonable type system. You don't get anything you couldn't get from another language.
It's not a tradeoff, it's just a bad choice.
> As much of a pile of hot steaming code as it is, Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool. Of course you can do this in other places but its featuring prominently in the JS community leading to an interesting result. The language and its features become configurable, easy to adapt and change and evolve over time and suit to your liking. This is interesting!
Interesting, yes, and useful. But there's really no reason this had to be written in JavaScript, and the code would likely be a lot less of a "pile of hot steaming code" if it were written in a more reasonable ecosystem.
> Of course there are lots of negatives, lots of horrible code, lots of mistakes happening.
The problem isn't that there is bad code, it's that there isn't any good code. If you needed to write a server-side program and you chose JavaScript, your code is bad and you should feel bad. It's literally impossible to write good server code in JavaScript because it doesn't provide adequate types or threading primitives. It would be different if there weren't alternatives (like in the browser), but there are alternatives which are better.
Look at all this horrible code! So sad that all these people are not as smart as me. Look at this horrible language! So sad the people that created it are not as intelligent as me!
Really? There is no more "problem" with Node.js than there is a "problem" with any other platform. There is no more problem with JavaScript/ES-(name your flavor) than there is with any programming language. Different languages are different. Different platforms are different. Of course every system has its own problems. Sometimes people who appreciate them call these "tradeoffs" or the superior types call them idiotic.
The cliche´ of hacker news haters is really really really getting old. So here are some things that are actually good.
As much of a pile of hot steaming code as it is, Babel as an idea (AKA transpiling one language to another) is pretty cool. Of course you can do this in other places but its featuring prominently in the JS community leading to an interesting result. The language and its features become configurable, easy to adapt and change and evolve over time and suit to your liking. This is interesting!
Finally as opposed to what others may have said about the community being childish I have found the opposite. I find it to be very welcoming and supportive, friendly and honestly creative. Of course there are lots of negatives, lots of horrible code, lots of mistakes happening. But what is missed in all of this? Theres A LOT of stuff happening that is good even great! It's beautiful chaos! So go on hating, but I see lots of great stuff out there. As one great systems and iOS developer told me the other day "Have you tried Express? Its awesome!" HA yeah. But he just tried it, and loves it!
Oh but look at that callback YUCK! Cmon