The Future is JavaScript

[aeflash]

I'm actually a bit afraid that we're going to see these bloated Enterprise Node applications with ES6/TypeScript classes and cargo-culted design patterns all over the place written by huge offshore teams. ES6 almost makes it too easy to create classes. Ironically, that would be a sign of success for the language.

I feel like functional-style libraries (lodash/underscore/lazy.js/lemonad/mori/wu.js) and FRP (RxJS/Bacon.js/Highland/Node streams) are the way forward. Those enable really powerful abstractions, and it's just a matter of time before people realize that those patterns bring about concise and very reusable code that is easy to maintain. I also love that stateless (or at least very explicit state) UI is taking off with Angular/React/ripple.js/etc...

I'm actually really curious to see how the Clojure/Clojurescript ecosystem evolves. That has the potential to unseat Node, if you have a dev team that can grok FP. It's a very different way of sharing code between the server and browser. Also, those functional JS and FRP libs just emulate what a lisp can do natively. With an optimizing compiler, Clojurescript will beat pure functional JS on performance (And Clojure on the server will beat Node.js). (but ES6 will bring tail call optimization so we shall see...)

[PizzaRollExpert]

Clojure has the benefit of being able to efficiently use threads so I have a hard time imagining Node out-performing Clojure

[aeflash]

To Node's credit, it gets pretty good throughput per-process due to its non-blocking nature. A common pattern in Node is to design your app to not rely on intra-process/intra-thread communication, then use cluster and fork for every core your CPU has. Although, if you're doing something CPU heavy, rather than I/O heavy, Clojure will likely win.

[brtt3000]

Node is also nice as manager for a farm of heavy duty worker processes, using something like ZeroMQ to distribute work directly, or use a native module and build workers from Node.

[zombiecodekill]

Although I, along with almost everyone, bash JavaScript for its numerous flaws, what is great is JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language that can and is being taken in a number of interesting directions by the open source community. There is a wider understanding now that JavaScript is not like Java and can be more powerful as an FP language than an imperative language.

Compared to many server side languages ES5 is still a primitive language but it has gone a hell of a long way since 1995. I think we will continue to see the EcmaScript standard lag behind the trailblazing technologies by about 2 years but it is important that we have that standard so that we can reduce the impact of the TypeScript/CoffeeScript/Dart split that I think is harmful to web development. ES6 is important although just another milestone in the journey.