So though it's completely unfair to characterize a technology stack based on the poor implementations built on top of it by 3rd parties, I completely get what this guy is saying:

If you've spent as much time as I have plumbing the depths of .Net, you know as well as I that it's full of mean surprises that get marked as "won't fix". The vendor selling it to you doesn't care - they don't build actual stuff with it; it's just there to drive server license sales.

He's comparing that to using packages on Node. Here's his Node sum:

[Node is] one of the very few languages that has a package system that isn't a steaming pile of [nastiness] and the core libraries are small and useful. Most of the libs I've used are maintainted [sic] by decent folks who actually acknowledge issues and accept PRs.

I just started fishing around in node search, and it isn't all pretty. And it's not like .NET doesn't have any well-maintained, friendly, open-source projects, but I get his point here too. I'd probably even agree that as you move from .NET's core to its "core libraries", quality suffers. LINQ is great, but that's a core language feature at this point, I believe.

The nice part about Node is that it's very Linux-on-the-desktop-y, in that simply being a Linux user means you're willing to accept many things your standard workstation user would not.

Node usage presupposes a few things whose importance we might underestimate:

*Users are familiar with the command line. *They know JavaScript well. * They don't mind basing their livelihood on an open source library. * Every node app, at least the node part, is headless/UI-less.

That's a pretty select group of folks, and one I'd rather work with than the guys who need point-and-click admin interfaces (not that everyone who uses MS does, but those who do need the hand-holding are largely welcome there [1]) who think SSRS is the way to create web interfaces for their reports (and sympathy to anyone whose job forces them to use SSRS. You know, node and MS SQL really aren't that bad together...).

[1] I had MS SQL Server training years ago, and wow. The guy I was working with did almost everything from the command line, it seemed, or at least could, and would if it was easier than the GUIs, so that's how I was learning to do it too. But man, there were tons of people in the course who only knew how to run a SELECT by right-clicking a table in what's now SQL Management Studio and selecting the SELECT options from the context-menus there.

Last month, I took a training course on administrating VMware's vCOps/vROps. Same deal. Though you could use PowerCLI to pull out all of these metrics and then pretty much push them wherever you wanted, the course was all about how to left & right-click your way through wizards with exceptionally klunky UIs to make management-friendly "dashboards" whose metrics those admins might or might not actually understand.

Labels: node