Wow, a node.js company writes a blog post how node.js is the next technology and you should switch over (and hire them, they do node.js consulting!)
Uhm.. yes.. node.js is great but this article is not.
I can write the exact same article with success stories about PHP, Ruby, Python, Erlang, Perl and with a little bit of creativity about brainfuck..
Indeed. That fluff article reminds me of the .NET spam around 2005. Pointing out three times that "the best developers...like to use new technologies": so, they leave you with a pile of smelling javascript over two years when they are heading for <fill in>. Are they the best by the way? or does it feel like being the best when you can finally add two numbers in a new language? Oh, and that "developer hapiness" argument again. Then: "composed from modules, piped together" contrasted with "traditional monolithic applications". So the writer (or the node developers he represents) was/were unable writing composable code in the other languages they know? (must be a lot, see above) Just wait until their piped modules look like this: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/image/brazil21.jpg
Fortran is the oldest programming language in existence today, because of this it has a lot of cruft. However, if you put your compiler in standard mode (2003 or 2008 standard) you have a pretty modern language: modules, interfaces, functions that contains functions etc ... You can do OOP in Fortran if you use a modern compiler and stay close to the standard.
Where Java beats hands down Fortran is at the huge ecosystem and libraries available for a variety of domains. Another weak spot for Fortran is that it doesn't stop you to shoot yourself in the foot and you can use implicit types, case insensitivity and globals all over the place.
Doesn't need to be a blog post, list some cases of people switching back to PHP, Ruby, Python, Erlang or Perl with the sizes of Wallmart, Paypal, Voxer, etc...
Not the same size, but this was a company that spent a lot of time chasing the Rails fad in 2005/2006/2007, and switched back to PHP. I wouldn't doubt the same type of stories may be told about node in a year or two, although few will ever be terribly public. Few companies like to promote out their bad decisions (not saying node is definitely a bad decision).
At my company(we are small just 2 devs), I decided to go down the Node route, because why not, the project I just got off of was a lot of client javascript(with Play framework) and it made sense. This was the end of 2011. I was looking for something to replace Play framework because the impending doom of Play 2.0(which ended up being terrible..for us).
As I got into it more and writing more business logic it started to fall apart. The async nature really started to show it's face. The async library was awesome in helping with taming the callbacks . When you want to execute queries in series, iterate over data, manipulate the data coming in and then write some data to a csv, it's just not pretty.
The code looked good, and it was all in really small functions, but making sense of order of execution with callbacks flying all over the place proved difficult. It was possible definitely but if you looked at the logic in Java, it was just like a big sigh of relief. Not sure how to explain it but looking at code that executes like you think it would makes me happier.
Luckily we didn't have too many projects done in Node and switched to Rails 6 months after and have been happy ever sense. I've revisited Node a few times, but even with generators it makes certain things blah. Specifically looping through arrays that need to execute callback code.
I really, really want to like Node.JS, but it's just not there for me. For me both languages on the client and server is overrated anyway and with Angular I'm writing less Javascript then I ever have.
Uhm.. yes.. node.js is great but this article is not. I can write the exact same article with success stories about PHP, Ruby, Python, Erlang, Perl and with a little bit of creativity about brainfuck..