TodPunk posted:

I have always felt Node.js is a nice toy that got taken way too seriously. I get it as a prototyping platform or something, just like I write my prototypes in flask or (if I need some more structure) pyramid, but only because I know python. You CAN take those to production I guess, as they're just tools albeit poor ones, but I don't know why people get all googly eyed over any of them unless that's literally all they know.

"Oh but this fits our needs in production!" I hear this all the time, especially at meetups and such, and invariably if you ask in earnest it just turns out they know how to use thing X and they can solve the problem in thing X with a healthy dose of googling "How do I do <part of X>" so they do that and it displays on the page. That's fine, good for them for building a thing, but if they knew more about the landscape they'd know why it causes headaches in the long run and why its less efficient than any number of other things for their specific needs. Granted, on the other end of the spectrum, if more senior programmers weren't such asshats about the "hipster javascript enthusiasts" and instead were more accepting of their strictly beginner-with-potential status, we'd be helping rather than creating camps at war.

Webdev is just terrible all around. It pays the bills, but having done embedded dev, application dev, systems dev, and FAA bureaucracy laden versions of some of that, web dev is definitely the more clown shoes of the bunch. It also requires the most oddball knowledge set to really do it well. For instance, you CAN setup a website with both backend and frontend in Javascript without knowing what an IP address is (I'm serious, I see it done all the time) but when something breaks (it always does) it's going to be a "learning experience" to be sure. Most other programming requires you know things like that up front before you can even code the solution to your problem. Web dev has abstractions upon abstractions hiding virtually everything from you unless you know how it works behind the walls.

Essentially, web dev is to most programming what interior decorating is to most construction. I say this as a terrible interior decorator.