Ask HN: what makes Node.js hip?

11 points

15 years ago

When RoR became a big thing, I could pretty easily catch up with the events, even as an outsider. I was able to pin it down in one sentence: "RoR implements a popular pattern, MVC, in a language which makes it possible to do it with ease & dynamism at a level that was not seen before". It's a clear selling point, from that I could understand why people jump on the RoR bandwagon.

However, now Node.js seems to be the next big thing, and I'm just scratching my head. I have the respective one-sentence summary at hand -- "Node.js is an asynchronous event-based server side javascipt framework", but that does not let the bulbs go up in my head. "asynch event-based" in itself is not a novel thing, and I don't see why doing it in javascript takes it to the next level, or if not js is the big deal here, then what particular aspect makes it cooler than other similar beasts. (I have nothing against javascript, I just don't see the kind of advantage (over what?) which I could spot with Ruby vs. the "standard" MVC language, Java.)

Can someone give a better compact summary which reveals the trick more aptly, or point out how the above cited one is a selling point, or explain it in a "What it fixes"[http://paulgraham.com/fix.html] style...

Or maybe there is no point in trying to make it into a silver bullet, it's just simply written well and marketed well?

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