

Ask HN - Why are NodeJS devs so zealous? - knuckledragger

I'm posting this as "not myself" mostly as some of my team also frequents these parts.<p>I have a simple question -- Is there something about NodeJS (or the ecosystem) that causes those that enjoy it to become comparable to religious zealots?<p>I'm a generalist.  In the passed few years I've done Node dev, PHP, python, C/C++, Objective-C, Java and others.  For me it is -- toolset, task, other devs around.<p>The one commonality, however, is that when a project comes up where Node isn't the best tool (maybe a desire for more mature tooling like Eclipse or the Ops staff is more familiar w/ the Java ecosystem), if there is a dev on the team that is all in on Node, they refuse to see the merits of anything else.<p>I just find it bazaar and I'm trying to figure out why.  I don't mean this as flame bait, as I mentioned, I've used it and it has it's uses.  I'm just more mercenary in my tooling.
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rudimk
I like the zealous part :)

On a serious note - I'm a tad mercenary too. I like Node, but I'm definitely
not zealous about it.

I guess it's because Node devs end up really enjoying the fact that they're
using a stack that's scalable, and of course, gives them the benefit of
writing both client and server code in the same language. I can say, however,
that the zealousness you see, is something that's there with just about every
stack there is - seen it happen with Rails, Flask, ASP.NET MVC. It's just that
you don't always see it out in the open. So that leads me to another question
- why's this..zealousness so apparent with Node devs?

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eip
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg>

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bcoates
If you're in a one-language shop, and you hate that language, you may see node
as your only hope--it's the only alternative that can't be shot down with
"We'd have to train everybody up in that weird other language"

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jt2190
Once upon a time, there was a dev who was zealous about:

    
    
      * Assembler
      * C
      * C++
      * Lisp
      * Java
      * PHP
      * C#
      * VB
      * JavaScript
      .
      .
      .

~~~
rudimk
In a galaxy, far, far away..

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factorialboy
> I just find it bazaar and I'm trying to figure out why.

Sometimes I find a lot of bazaars =)

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twic
Well, at least it's not cathedral.

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twic
I get the impression that Go partisans are like this too.

