Re:“Node.js is one of the worst things to happen to the soft...
by catnaroek on Tuesday August 23, 2016 @04:02AM
(#12342098)
> make pretty much everything async.
This isn't intrinsically bad. It just makes Node.js biased towards use cases that benefit from asynchronous I/O, which is a perfectly valid design choice. Sensible programmers already know that computationally intensive tasks that benefit from actual parallelism are best served by a different tool.
What's absolutely horrible about Node.js is how they make everything asynchronous: explicit continuation passing everywhere. In other words, the user is responsible for manually multiplexing multiple logical threads through a single-OS-threaded event loop. If it sounds low level, it's because it is low-level. A high-level programming language ought to to better than this.
Other languages get this right: Erlang, Go, Clojure, Scala, Haskell, Rust, etc.
This isn't intrinsically bad. It just makes Node.js biased towards use cases that benefit from asynchronous I/O, which is a perfectly valid design choice. Sensible programmers already know that computationally intensive tasks that benefit from actual parallelism are best served by a different tool.
What's absolutely horrible about Node.js is how they make everything asynchronous: explicit continuation passing everywhere. In other words, the user is responsible for manually multiplexing multiple logical threads through a single-OS-threaded event loop. If it sounds low level, it's because it is low-level. A high-level programming language ought to to better than this.
Other languages get this right: Erlang, Go, Clojure, Scala, Haskell, Rust, etc.