Ask HN: Going full stack with JavaScript, any regrets?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967795

by stephen82 • 9 years ago

5 3 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Those of you who have been early adopters of Node.js, what are the cons and pros you have identified over a period of time?

Have you witnessed any negative impact on your development performance or have your coding skills improved as a whole?

I'm looking forward to hear your stories.

Cheers.

xenopticon• 9 years ago

I went full JS three years ago from a Java/Spring background and never looked back.

As a solo developer I noticed a huge increase in productivity and the time it took to ship code to production. My use case is a SaaS application with ~50 users.

Coding skills did improve but I think that's just a natural progression for everyone and wouldn't attribute it to a specific language.

Pros: very open community, lots of learning resources, no enforced standards.

Cons: it's easy to get things wrong, keeping up with new libraries is intimidating.

Tip: start small, create a twitter bot or something, use ES7

OtterCoder• 9 years ago

I would agree with Xenopticon, as a solo operator, it's been a huge boon. However, I have noticed a bit of a split in the way I code.

The problem is that I tend to write two kinds of JS. On the server I write ES7 and use currying, iteration, and promises as the main paradigm, while on the client side code I tend to write more compatible, imperative, event oriented code.

It's a bit of a bizarre split, and it does impact my productivity. Perhaps I would be better off using Babel, but I tend to avoid adding steps to my toolchain, since I'm the only one who will maintain it.

stephen82• 9 years ago

I have noticed the same thing, even as a "newbie" around Node.js.

It's true that with the use of a transpiler you fix things in a way.

Thank you both for your feedback folks.

Ask HN: Going full stack with JavaScript, any regrets?

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