I cannot go with such a messy ecosystem. I find Python highly preferrable for my backend code for more or less low and middle traffic stuff.
I know Python is not that good deployment-wise, but the language is really understandable, I have tools for every use case, I can easily provide bindings from C++ code and it is a joy to work with.
If on top of that, they keep increasing its performance, I think I will stick to it for lots of backend tasks (except for high performance, where I have lately been doing with C++ and Capnproto RPC for distributed stuff).
It comes down to language preferences. I find Python to be the worst thing computer science has to offer. No nested scoping in functions, variables leak through branches and loops due to lack of scopes, no classic for loops, but worst of all, installing python packages and frameworks never ever goes smoothly.
I would like to love Jupyter notebooks because Notebooks are great for prototyping, but Jupyter and Python plotting libs are so clunky and slow, I always have to fall back to Node or writing a web page with JS and svg for plotting and prototyping.
At least on Windows, in my opinion, VB is still the best language ever created for that. Borland had a good stab at it with their IDEs but nothing really came close to VB6 in terms of speed and ease of development.
Granted this isn't JS's fault, but CSS et al is just a mess in comparison.
- Cross-platform development
You have a point there. VB6 was a different era though.
- Type safety
VB6 wins here again
- Readability
This is admittedly subjective, but I personally don't find idiomatic node.js code all that readable. VB's ALGOL-inspired roots aren't for everyone but if I personally don't mind Begin/End blocks.
- Consistency
JS has so many weird edge cases. That's not to say that VB didn't have its own quirks. However they were less numerous in my experience.
Then you have inconsistencies between different JS implementations too.
- Concurrency
Both languages fail badly here. Yeah node has async/await but i personally hate that design and, ultimately, node.js is still single-threaded at its core. So while JS is technically better, it's still so bad that I cannot justify giving it the win here.
- Developer familiarity
JS is used by more people.
- Code longevity
Does this metric even deserve a rebuttal given the known problem of Javascript framework churn? You can't even recompile any sizable 2 year old Javascript projects without running into problems. Literally every other popular language trumps Javascript in that regard.
- Developer tooling
VB6 came with everything you needed and worked from the moment you finished the VB Visual Studio install.
With node.js you have a plethora of different moving parts you need to manually configure just to get started.
---
I'm not suggesting people should write new software in VB. But it was unironically a good language for what it was designed for.
Node/JS isn't even a good language for its intended purpose. It's just a clusterfuck of an ecosystem. Even people who maintain core JS components know this -- which is what tooling is constantly being migrated to other languages like Rust and Go. And why some many people are creating businesses around their bespoke JS runtimes aiming to solve the issues that node.js create (and thus creating more problems due to ever-increasing numbers of "standards").
Literally the only redeemable factor of node.js is the network effect of everyone using it. But to me that feels more like Stockholm Syndrome than a ringing endorsement.
And if the best compliment you can give node.js is "it's better than this other ecosystem that died 2 decades ago" then you must realise yourself just how bad things really are.
> But to me that feels more like Stockholm Syndrome
Just an FYI, but Stockholm Syndrome isn't real. In general I agree with the intended point though, people just like what they are familiar with and probably have a bias for what they learned first or used longest.
More or less accidentally I turned a simple Excel spreadsheet into a sizable data management system. Once you learn where the bottlenecks are, it is surprising how fast VB is nowadays.
I know Javascript is fast but...
I cannot go with such a messy ecosystem. I find Python highly preferrable for my backend code for more or less low and middle traffic stuff.
I know Python is not that good deployment-wise, but the language is really understandable, I have tools for every use case, I can easily provide bindings from C++ code and it is a joy to work with.
If on top of that, they keep increasing its performance, I think I will stick to it for lots of backend tasks (except for high performance, where I have lately been doing with C++ and Capnproto RPC for distributed stuff).
It comes down to language preferences. I find Python to be the worst thing computer science has to offer. No nested scoping in functions, variables leak through branches and loops due to lack of scopes, no classic for loops, but worst of all, installing python packages and frameworks never ever goes smoothly.
I would like to love Jupyter notebooks because Notebooks are great for prototyping, but Jupyter and Python plotting libs are so clunky and slow, I always have to fall back to Node or writing a web page with JS and svg for plotting and prototyping.
That depends entirely on what you measure:
- Rapid application development
VB was easier and quicker
- GUI development
At least on Windows, in my opinion, VB is still the best language ever created for that. Borland had a good stab at it with their IDEs but nothing really came close to VB6 in terms of speed and ease of development.
Granted this isn't JS's fault, but CSS et al is just a mess in comparison.
- Cross-platform development
You have a point there. VB6 was a different era though.
- Type safety
VB6 wins here again
- Readability
This is admittedly subjective, but I personally don't find idiomatic node.js code all that readable. VB's ALGOL-inspired roots aren't for everyone but if I personally don't mind Begin/End blocks.
- Consistency
JS has so many weird edge cases. That's not to say that VB didn't have its own quirks. However they were less numerous in my experience.
Then you have inconsistencies between different JS implementations too.
- Concurrency
Both languages fail badly here. Yeah node has async/await but i personally hate that design and, ultimately, node.js is still single-threaded at its core. So while JS is technically better, it's still so bad that I cannot justify giving it the win here.
- Developer familiarity
JS is used by more people.
- Code longevity
Does this metric even deserve a rebuttal given the known problem of Javascript framework churn? You can't even recompile any sizable 2 year old Javascript projects without running into problems. Literally every other popular language trumps Javascript in that regard.
- Developer tooling
VB6 came with everything you needed and worked from the moment you finished the VB Visual Studio install.
With node.js you have a plethora of different moving parts you need to manually configure just to get started.
---
I'm not suggesting people should write new software in VB. But it was unironically a good language for what it was designed for.
Node/JS isn't even a good language for its intended purpose. It's just a clusterfuck of an ecosystem. Even people who maintain core JS components know this -- which is what tooling is constantly being migrated to other languages like Rust and Go. And why some many people are creating businesses around their bespoke JS runtimes aiming to solve the issues that node.js create (and thus creating more problems due to ever-increasing numbers of "standards").
Literally the only redeemable factor of node.js is the network effect of everyone using it. But to me that feels more like Stockholm Syndrome than a ringing endorsement.
And if the best compliment you can give node.js is "it's better than this other ecosystem that died 2 decades ago" then you must realise yourself just how bad things really are.
> But to me that feels more like Stockholm Syndrome
Just an FYI, but Stockholm Syndrome isn't real. In general I agree with the intended point though, people just like what they are familiar with and probably have a bias for what they learned first or used longest.
More or less accidentally I turned a simple Excel spreadsheet into a sizable data management system. Once you learn where the bottlenecks are, it is surprising how fast VB is nowadays.
It already is worse. VB was, for all its shortcommings as a language, an insanelly productive development environment for what it was intended to.
Low bar!