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Discussion on: What irritates you the most as a developer? 👩‍💻👨‍💻

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Paul Johnson

The immaturity of the Node/Typescript ecosystem and the amount of fiddling around with the environment it requires to get basic things going. I actually think someone could make a career as a Node BS wrangler, at least for the next few years.

I think if I was going to do a bog standard website project I would revisit using Rails.

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Daniel Ziltener

Why people are even considering in the first place to use JavaScript engines server side is beyond me...

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Paul Johnson

There's parts of the ecosystem I like, on it's own I think Typescript is pretty good and at least in theory the massive amount of investment that browser vendors make on Javascript VMs should benefit performance vs say Python.

I think it's more the problem of combining the existing Node JS module system, es6 modules, bundling for the frontend etc.

But yeah, things like lack of proper integer and float types is pretty dumb 😃.

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Jeremy Forsythe

JS is actually very good on the server. Ask Netflix.

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Daniel Ziltener

Ahh yes, that must be why the language they use the most is Java instead of JS

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Jeremy Forsythe • Edited

While it's true that they still run a lot of Java code, all of their web stack is JS. Or as they put it, everything a user sees is written in JS.

In another case, PayPal found that an app rewritten from Java to JS was more performance, serving double the req/sec one one core as the Java app did on 5 cores, so they made the switch.

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Daniel Ziltener

PayPal has (or at least had) reportedly such a horribly awful code base, they could've rewritten it in BASIC for an interpreter and still get a 5-time performance increase, lol! Really they had to rewrite their stuff anyways. Java still is the most performant bytecode VM out there, let alone speaking of the performance of tech like GraalVM... (plus it is multithreading capable, unlike Node)

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Jeremy Forsythe • Edited

If you think the TS ecosystem is immature, try cloning the DefinitelyTyped repo.

TS + Node is easy to set up nowadays. ts-node allows you to debug it directly, no transpiling. We only run tsc when we're ready to ship. We write TS microservices daily with no issue. We clone a setup repo and start writing code.

github.com/jdforsythe/typescript-n... has what you need to start writing code immediately

But if I were making a blog I would use an SSG like hugo, not TS or Rails.