r-wos.org

Playing with node.js currently, and I don’t grok it. I’m passable (not “good”, just passable) in JavaScript but I don’t get why anyone would ever want to program in the style node.js dictates.

It’s async, yeah. Only async. And async without language-level promises, or channels, or a select. Or multi-processing. Or anything really. They basically write in continuation passing style. In one thread. By hand. And it wouldn’t completely surprise me if they chiseled it in stone and OCR’d it back.

If you are going backwards, you might as well go all the way.

Let’s make two HTTP requests, shall we?

var result_1, result 2;
http.get("http://one.com",
  function(response) {
    response.on('data',
      function(data) {
        result_1 = data;
        http.get("http://two.com",
          function(response) {
            response.on('data',
              function(data) {
                result_2 = data;
                // do stuff with the results
              }
            );
          }
        );
      }
    );
  }
);

The fuck? Now, there are libraries that transform that pyramid of callbacks into a single one – but that’s just a cosmetic change. It’s still a series of callbacks. And – as far as I understand – there is no force(promise) – in other words, no way to sync.

Why don’t they just do it synchronously? Why is there no blocking API? I don’t get it.

Note that this doesn’t have anything to do with performance. If I want the two requests to succeed before going on, I’ll have to wait for them – in both async and synchronous style.

The only thing that that async fuck-up buys me is that I now have a bunch of needlessly nested scopes.

Did I mention that I don’t get it?

Sure, sometimes it’s quite nice to do stuff asynchronously. Maybe it’s even a good idea to make non-blocking the default. But only non-blocking APIs?

Did I mention that…

Oh, yeah, I think I did.