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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

[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?

[eip]

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

[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"

[jt2190]

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

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

[rudimk → jt2190]

In a galaxy, far, far away..

[factorialboy]

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

Sometimes I find a lot of bazaars =)

[twic → factorialboy]

Well, at least it's not cathedral.

[twic]

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