Let's be honest: it is nothing to do with either of those and purely a matter of fashion. In a couple of years at most there will be a new new thing and everything will revert to version 0.1, keeping everyone busy but making no actual progress. Gotta soak up those CPU cycles the hardware people are giving us somehow right? Can't let the users get any of that speed for themselves!
The thing missing in developers that I have decried over and over in this devop/agile movement is that SAs had discipline and an ordered idea and that developers exist to perturb the norm to better effect. The two ideas are not readily reconcilable.
Let's be honest: if you need "fashion" or "idiocy" etc to explain a trend in tech, you don't have an explanation.
Your explanation wouldn't even explain why it was Node+JS that got to be "in fashion" and not something else from the 20000 options.
That's the point. There is no explanation, other than the same reason that bellbottoms are in again this year. Or out, I don't actually know.
We pretend like we're "engineers" or "scientists" but there's nothing objective about what we do...
You mean you can't come up with one. Because for me, which followed the scene for 20+ years, there is a perfect explanation.
I had a homepage in 1994. I've seen them all come and go. This one's no different.
It’s as relevant as saying we don’t write apps in COBOL or Modula2 anymore.
I'm frustrated that better stuff doesn't win in the market as well, but I've been a web developer 20 years and Node's appeal was pretty obvious and exactly as the GP states. Without that it would not have gained traction to become fashionable.
The real innovation that the Node environment and the Javascript language offered is one of marketing to developers who did not know better. Because there were no I/O paradigms in Javascript, one could be created to support this way of doing things, and there was no competing paradigm that people could point to in Javascript to say "Why would I do this when I could just use threads? It's not that hard."
With that out of the way, the floodgates opened, because once the first few people started adopting it because they did not understand threads, it was only a matter of time when "front end" people adopted it, because they did not know any languages other than Javascript. And thus, the current fad was born.
Node's success has everything to do with the environment itself in combination with the language. The node runtime, the associated stdlib, and most open source/3rd party modules have been written for a non-blocking runtime from day #1. The same stuff can be achieved in plenty of other languages/stacks (e.g. Python + Twisted), but you have much more work to do validating that every single library you use plays nice with async io, sometimes you have more event loop housekeeping responsibilities, etc...