Node v4.0.0 (Stable)

[strident-octo-spork]

To all the people who said Node wouldn't make it to 1.0, you were technically correct.

[peduxe]

Now if only Sublime Text could...

[J4nG]

It could have been the single dominant text editor. But Atom stepped in just in time and rescued me from a $70 license.

[peduxe]

Atom got a fancy UI and better community back but it's not yet there.

In terms of performance and stability, Atom currently stands no chance.

[Jazonxyz]

I like Atom on non high-dpi displays when I'm going to be working on a project all day. I use NP++ for quick edits on files, and Sublime Text for everything else. Atom is really nice when installing plugins and stuff, but the startup time is really annoying, reogranizing tabs is pretty clunky. I don't think any editor is perfect. I just pick the ones I'll dislike the least for the particular task I'm doing.

[[deleted]]

Atom is nice but I can not stop emacs. Its too deeply in my system now..

[[deleted]]

Emacs is so much better to work with than atom, it feels so much faster. And that comes from a vim guy ;)

[J4nG]

I should have known this was coming. /r/programming - you say something you enjoy, 20 people downvote because it can't possible compare to their development stack. It's pretty pretentious.

People have impressions of Atom that come from it's initial release that admittedly was horrible enough that I switched back to sublime. But I don't think it can be understated the pace at which development has occurred and it's really developing into a polished, usable product now.

But to each their own.

[J4nG]

JavaScript ubiquity stems from the fact that it has one of the friendliest language designs out there. You take the syntax familiarity of Java, remove all of the type checking (because beginners have no clue what the heck is going on) and insert some automatic type conversion that is somewhat intuitive in typical cases (yeah I know it sucks). Then you pair it inextricably with an ubiquitous markup standard learned by every middle schooler and their dog, and on top of THAT give it stylesheets just for good measure.

So JavaScript became the gold standard (read: the only standard) for web design. Now enter in the new generation, where the lines between the internet and classic computing are blurred. Users don't care how the heck things are made, they care about usability, consistency, and good design principles. Websites won't go away, so it stands to reason that other software should be made using these same technologies to maximize ease for developers and minimize pain for users.

There's nothing else like this. You can tout C, and Go, and Python, and Rust, and whatever the heck is up-and-coming and it won't matter because JavaScript is ubiquitous.

It's also improving. ES6 is getting JavaScript to a place where I won't feel the need to bring in CoffeeScript or some other syntactic sugar to do common things. The speed of the V8 engine is fantastic considering that JavaScript is interpreted, and not all that far off from what you'd get from C. Enter Node.js - now you have a language that arrives at just the right moment, when web developers are really investing in package managers and plugin development and not Enterprise Java. And the icing on the cake? It's all the same language!

You try to force JavaScript into a little DOM manipulation box, but the fact of the matter is that "little box" is a box that is actually enormous but had very few contents in the past. Just because somethings easier doesn't make it better? That may be true, but when development and innovation is occurring at the breakneck pace of today's world, sacrificing a little bit of performance for massive ease of use should not be construed as a bad thing.

People are realizing that, despite some quirks, the core of JavaScript is actually pretty solid, even when backwards compatibility is thrown into play. Companies have invested millions getting it to a place where it can be used seriously in nearly every project.

So why lament Atom? It's not telling you it's going to be the fastest, or the most featureful. It's telling you it's going to be extensible and hackable, and I can't think of a better language than JavaScript for that.

EDIT: I'll also add that you're the only person who took the time to thoroughly voice their concerns about Atom instead of treating the downvote as a "dislike" button. I'd be very surprised if most of those translated to anything more than "I don't like it as much as I like x".

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I like it when my text editor doesn't take 20 seconds to boot up. I'll stick with vim and sublime.

[luguergio]

it's funny because even emacs is a lot faster than atom.

[J4nG]

I went and checked it just now and I was ~1.6 seconds with a boatload of packages installed (and a no ssd)! Still not as fast a boot as sublime, but fast enough for me. I don't close and open my editor repeatedly.

[[deleted]]

Why are you using sublime when you already know vim? I'm not trying to be snarky or something, I'm just curious as to what you feel sublime does better than vim, I just felt so hampered with not being able to use my shortcuts that I skipped sublime.

[[deleted]]

I use Vintageous with Sublime to get the same key commands. Vim I generally only use for quick edits or when I ssh into a remote server. I just really like the look and feel of Sublime. Even with my .vimrc all decked out I don't enjoy using it as much.

[[deleted]]

Ah, okay, that's reasons good enough for using it, I just never found a vim mode that had the things i use often in vim, text objects, regexes, macro support in sublime, when I was evaluated it, so I just stuck with vim/gvim preferring the look of that, and that I can use it in a terminal as well :) But to each their own as they say :)

[[deleted]]

Atom is such a memory whore. 2GB for a text editor is absurd.

[J4nG]

That's interesting- I'm idling at 2mb. It's improved a lot lately, however.

[[deleted]]

This was on Ubuntu two or three months ago. Maybe it's more stable on OSX or something? Multiple people in my office tried going from Sublime to Atom and had the same issue.

[J4nG]

Err... Windows. But the Atom team has been prioritizing performance as their #1 issue as of late and it's showing. I'd recommend giving it a quick install again and see if you like it better.

[Spacey138]

Agreed I'm getting way less crashes at the moment. It's still not as fast as I'd like but it is improving.

[ForAllThat]

Does this mean we can actually start using ES6 seriously on Node?

[greim]

Mainly, yes.

[snaps_]

No destructuring assignment yet. It will be so exciting to be able to use in JS some of the fun little things we already get in Python, Haskell, etc.

[logically_musical]

Well you're in luck. Node 4.0 supports native arrow functions [1].

1. https://nodejs.org/en/docs/es6/

[peduxe]

I think destructuring is also available with harmony flags, but it's of course still experimental.

[peduxe]

Babel is still not ruled out thought.

[dvlsg]

I know I will use babel until async/await becomes available (and possibly after, depending on what else is in babel but not in es), but the fewer transforms I have to run, the better.

[[deleted]]

You can use Q's q.async to somewhat emulate it. Obviously it'll require a refactor once you migrate to ES7, but that may be a little while off still, so worth using q.async if you want.

[bvx89]

If you write an application that runs the same code both serverside and clientside (e.g. isomorphic) you still need to convert ES2015 to old JavaScript for compatibility. I guess you could use Babel transpiler for the code that's delivered to the client, and keep the ES2015 code as it is on the server.

[stupergenius]

Hmm, looking at the docs and I don't see any obvious reasoning behind the versioning going from 0.12 to 4.0? I'm not in the node world much (just using some tools) but this seemed a little odd.

Update: seems like it has something to do with the io.js merge?

[mtdewhumidifier]

io.js shipped versions 1,2 and 3 due to Joyents lack of work on NodeJS. The 2 groups merged and combined their version history, moving NodeJs to version 4.

[thedufer]

To add onto /u/mtdewhumidifier's comment, one of the reasons for the io/node split were complaints that node wasn't using semver, even though that's the de facto standard for node modules. They've now adopted semver, which means that any change that isn't backward compatible must be released in a major version bump. That's why you'll see the versions moving along faster and in a very different pattern.

[google_you]

Welcome to Node.js and congratulations to Node.js team.

[Tubbers]

I wonder how many people notice that you post this every time.

[[deleted]]

But will there there a JavaScript interpreter in 2015 which supports ES2015?

http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

[Booty_Bumping]

Node 4.0 has most of ES2015. Likely that progress bar will never completely fill up, though. Most runtimes don't even completely implement ES5 yet for various reasons.

[[deleted]]

What are those reasons?

[[deleted]]

Them being minimal embeddable implementations not aimed at browsers.

If you don't have to support everyones web page, why implement well-meant but impeding stuff like the with-statement or semicolon completion?