What purpose does it serve to take such an uncharitable view on other people?

This community is full of experienced professionals who use Javascript even in the face of alternative options, and we belabor this topic every day.

So what excuse do you have for assuming and hypothesizing that everyone must be an unenlightened boot camp amateur when you could've turned to anyone and simply asked?

For example, to me, modern JS is not substantially worse than other dynamically typed languages. Give me Python and Ruby code and the Javascript version probably looks the exact same. Meanwhile, those languages don't have a 1:1 version of `results = await Promise.map(urls, (url) => crawl(url), { concurrency: 8 })`. And that's not to start a language war but rather to demonstrate a concise example of a technical strength, aka a purely technical ground that a craftsperson could reach for that tool.

But now fold in its advantages like ubiquity, async-everything, runs natively in the browser, and has a static-typing system that's actually catching on, and it should be pretty obvious why someone could pick it when given an option beyond "they don't know any better."

Also, there's the obvious trade-off of treating your server as the API for all of your clients and treating the web as just another client that runs on the user's device instead of essentially coupling it with the server.

But surely these things are obvious or easy to find out, so it's hard to assume good faith in your post.

why is async everything a strength? I find it an unnatural way to think about coding, just like threading. Sure if performance absolutely requires it I'll start using threading, but why do it by default? A strength, in my eyes, is simplicity. What's simpler than a code that runs sequentially?

Node is single-threaded + async-everything which gives you simple concurrency with the async/await abstraction. It's these there things that come together to make building async apps simple. For example, I went out of my way to avoid Node before it had promises and async/await, and that seems to be the Javascript most HN users remember.

Concurrency in this situation almost becomes free at the expense of changing

    user = db.findUser(42)

to

    user = await db.findUser(42)

So when writing programs where you want more than one I/O thing to be happening at a time whether it's network requests or a bunch of concurrent workers, which is pretty much why you'd use Node, you get it trivially.

Even something like running parallel DB queries trivially inside an Express route:

    const [a, b] = Promise.all([db.findUser(42), db.somethingElse()])

Or starting one async early, waiting on another, and then ensuring that the first async thing is done later on:

    const a = runA() // returns a promise
    const b = await runB()
    return [a, await b]

And once again I think this is the a great example of a useful abstraction when writing anything with an I/O boundary:

    const results = await all(urls, url => crawler(url), { concurrency: 8 })

That code in Go would take me 40 lines and involve wait groups.

Compare that to Netty or trying to write async code in Rust where it's really easy to block the event loop because all libraries and stdlib are sync by default. So you're passing around a CPU pool to run sync code inside your async context. It's hard to look at that sort of code and understand its runtime behavior. Oops, you accidentally blocked. Oops, the pool gets saturated immediately and starts blocking. It's hard to straddle both worlds, and the code is constantly trying to "return to its sync default" so you have to be eternally vigilant. Sync isn't necessarily the default you want, either.

Of course, this comes with other expenses like needing to run one process per core and you can't do CPU-bound work in-process. But you may be used to that limitation using Ruby or Python for example.

I'm not trying to start a language war or tell you that you should drop what you're doing to use Node because it's The Best.

What I'm responding to is this idea that you couldn't possibly have a technical reason to use Node given a choice unless you're fresh out of a boot camp and know no better.

Node + Express is just fine for the same sorts of things that Sinatra is fine for. If you are more comfortable in JS than Ruby, please know that you have my full encouragement and support.

However, you are (perhaps unintentionally) twisting my words. I brought up bootcamps because I can demonstrate a strong causal association on a timeline.

The beef, such as it is, is with the 750k npm packages, the brutal moving target that is the packaging/transpiling/dependency hell/OCD bikeshedding that comes with a commitment to the JS ecosystem. And given that you used to be a Rails user, you know full well what giving up sane defaults in favour of the pursuit of pure compositional bliss looks like, but you're choosing to forget the trauma.

Meanwhile, there's an entire generation of new devs that have been told that Rails (or your favourite server side alternative) have been eclipsed by better thinking. I don't think I'm just an angry old man screaming at cars from my porch when I call bullshit.

Javascript is good for async code, still not sure why this is a great thing by default. It's nice when you want to write async code, do you always want to write async code? For most web apps I've seen you simply don't need to write them in such a way. Blocking IO will switch to a different thread in most ruby web servers anyway.

All that's nice at the language level in favor of JS, but it doesn't speak to the framework level of what all Rails offers compared to everything additional you need to add to React to be comparable. Same deal for some of the frameworks in PHP like Laravel or Drupal.

Comparing React vs Rails is like comparing an iOS app to Rails. I don't really see the point since they are fundamentally different, and whether your application should run on the client or not is a bedrock decision long before you get to "React vs Rails". Rails isn't even an option in one of the branches of that decision.

I assume you meant to instead draw a distinction between a large framework like Rails and a tiny one like Sinatra. And I'd say that ranges from a matter of taste to the composition of your team more than anything else. Obviously there are upsides and downsides to any point you can mark on the continuum.

I meant that if the Ruby community had an inherent preference for Sinatra-like frameworks such that Rails had the same status as Meteor or Sails does these days, then you would get articles by developers saying how they miss Django when having to reimplement a bunch of stuff in Sinatra that you automatically get with Django.

But you're right that I made an invalid comparison to React. It's more the starting with Node and having to add a bunch of functionality that you would get out of the box in Rails, because a front-end framework like React is the preference, and lots of developers would rather write isomorphic apps/sites.

It's difficult to convey context or background in these conversations, and they quickly become circular based on each participant's favourite default assumptions. For example, you're clearly excited about asynchronous, Promise-driven code patterns. I am preoccupied with developer happiness and ergonomics that come primarily as a result of opinionated defaults and a relatively stable ecosystem + build process. The simple truth is that if I needed results = async map -> crawl() in rb, I would call a service written in Go or Rust... but also, the number of times where I need to green-field a web crawler is dwarfed 250-1 by building the sexiest, snappiest CRUD UIs possible.

Meanwhile, there was once upon a time a perceived crisis of junior talent which led to the creation of the first code bootcamps, all of which were taught Rails, jQuery and Sass. I'm not trying to be shitty, classist or ageist in suggesting that the bootcamp phenomena suddenly started emitting a large number of blank-slate new devs that would understandably treat every exciting idea as the most incredible thing since <insert your fav noun>. After all, if you have few previous experiences, what can you compare against?

Previous generations of devs learned predominantly through either auto-didactic persistence or academic lectures; this new crop was suddenly predominantly learning from (and influencing) each other.

I recently read an excellent book called The Death of Truth, which technically has nothing to do with programming... except that in this conversation, it's totally about programming. If every coder's ideas are treated as equally valid truths even though there exists a massive gulf between their relative experiences, then we're confusing feelings with good engineering.

I think it's that, and the general accessibility of Javascript. Before this JS craze you saw the same shit with PHP and Visual Basic, though for the most part people weren't trying to build and rebuild the same platforms nearly as much as now

I know that it's 2008 calling, but seriously: when did Heroku, Github and the bundler/gem ecosystem stop qualifying as accessible? Deploying an MVP Rails app with sophisticated functionality is so effective that it still qualifies as erotic.

For me, the most compelling example of progress coming from the JS camp was my shallow investigation of the Expo platform for React Native. It has some genuinely sexy developer ergonomics features which I'd love to see make their way back into Rails.

I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.

I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up.

Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy to be of service.

Hi, if you are interested in helping people with their ruby/rails issues, there is also reddit / ruby discord / rails slack / and stack overflow. I'm trying to be active on Reddit and the Discord but not very active on slack/stack overflow. There are already quite a few people helping but more people would help :).

Ta.

True, any 15 year old framework will have bloat. But Rails is absolutely skinny compared to Spring, ASP and fellows. Its probably easier than a MEAN stack also.

That book is long, not because rails is bloated, but because there are very in depth sections building things from scratch like authentication that in practice are solved by gems. They are important for beginners to learn but are rarely reimplement from scratch in rails projects.