why node?

why-node.md

Why node.js?

Assumptions:

• three things matter: developer productivity, production performance, infrastructure cost

  • developer productivity: prototyping, productionifying, maintenance
  • production performance: latency, concurrency
  • infrastructure cost: hardware baseline, hardware scaling, operations (dev-ops) overhead

• same code on client and server (developer productivity)

  • no context switch
  • you can write a custom module for the server and run it on the client
    • this becomes even more important in a service oriented architecture
      • input validation
      • dynamic server-side rendering (initial page load)
  • you can use every fucking module on npm on the client with almost no effort
  • if you use a real database (CouchDB, MongoDB, RethinkDB), you can write your database queries in javascript, producing a zero context switch environment

• native json

  • oh yeah, the native web data structure is also just javascript (did I mention context switch reduction?)

• faster than almost everything else (except Go, and maybe Java) (production performance)

  • much easier to write than Java or Go (developer productivity)
  • even with OPcache and HHVM node is still faster: http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/comparing-node-js-vs-php-performance/
    • this gap is only going to increase as node matures
  • one java comparison here: http://blog.shinetech.com/2013/10/22/performance-comparison-between-node-js-and-java-ee/

• it's cheaper (cost)

  • you don't need a bajillion expensive servers to scale it

• AWS lambda could revolutionize the way we do dev-ops (cost, developer productivity, production performance)

  • you don't like to do it, and neither do I
  • less infrastructure set up, maintenance and scaling cost

• the developer community is smart like a mother-fucking whip

  • no offense to the people who program PHP, but the guy who created node was a mathematician, it shows in the community. I'm an asshole, but I'm right

• there are more modules on npm than on any other package management platform in existence: http://www.modulecounts.com/

  • like a lot more (almost 2x)
  • and it's growing faster than anything else

References

• Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
• The Multi-Tasking Myth