Thank you for writing this thoughtful post. The most important point for me has always been how CS fractures open source JS development. In a discussion around ShareJS' roadmap I suggested that Coffeescript worked as a barrier blocking contributions from the JS community at large (https://groups.google.com/f....
I was surprised at the pushback against what I thought was an obvious hindrance to the success of a great project, especially given that the suggested integration problems were already becoming obvious: (https://github.com/share/Sh...
Happily, the new version of ShareJS has been completely rewritten -- in Javascript (https://github.com/share/Sh...... and is even more popular.
I was a little uncomfortable with this line, however: "Many hip things that had potential to catch on have been pretty soundly spurned, at least by the node.js thought leadership)".
I think this is inaccurate, and may leave a false impression of the Node community on the reader. The "thought leadership" of the NodeJS community (if such a thing even exists) is not a few special people, but the entire community. This is the great genius of a tiny STDLIB -- decisions on how Node is used are made in userland, by those contributing modules. It is also important to note that nobody in that community "spurns" anything -- no npm module is ever deleted or rejected based on a committee's opinion of its "hipness" or perceived likelihood of success. The core maintainers work on fixing bugs and improving performance of the core, usually making their lives harder by maintaining backwards compatibility with older styles and modules. They don't rule by decree, at all.
I think the point you want to make is this: this extremely active community rejects ideas that don't work well enough. Node benefits from a free exchange (market) of ideas. If people aren't using CS it is because they haven't been convinced, on its own merits, to do so -- not because they have been told not to. That is is a much more telling, more accurate, statement.
Thank you for writing this thoughtful post. The most important point for me has always been how CS fractures open source JS development. In a discussion around ShareJS' roadmap I suggested that Coffeescript worked as a barrier blocking contributions from the JS community at large (https://groups.google.com/f....
I was surprised at the pushback against what I thought was an obvious hindrance to the success of a great project, especially given that the suggested integration problems were already becoming obvious: (https://github.com/share/Sh...
Happily, the new version of ShareJS has been completely rewritten -- in Javascript (https://github.com/share/Sh...... and is even more popular.
I was a little uncomfortable with this line, however: "Many hip things that had potential to catch on have been pretty soundly spurned, at least by the node.js thought leadership)".
I think this is inaccurate, and may leave a false impression of the Node community on the reader. The "thought leadership" of the NodeJS community (if such a thing even exists) is not a few special people, but the entire community. This is the great genius of a tiny STDLIB -- decisions on how Node is used are made in userland, by those contributing modules. It is also important to note that nobody in that community "spurns" anything -- no npm module is ever deleted or rejected based on a committee's opinion of its "hipness" or perceived likelihood of success. The core maintainers work on fixing bugs and improving performance of the core, usually making their lives harder by maintaining backwards compatibility with older styles and modules. They don't rule by decree, at all.
I think the point you want to make is this: this extremely active community rejects ideas that don't work well enough. Node benefits from a free exchange (market) of ideas. If people aren't using CS it is because they haven't been convinced, on its own merits, to do so -- not because they have been told not to. That is is a much more telling, more accurate, statement.