Discussing node.js - Computerphile

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[Rob]

As someone who has done a ton of firmware and end user programming, I barely know anything about web programming. I'd love this series.

[algp]

Here's a potential Computerphile video topic: Ryan Dahl, in his original presentation of Node, said something like: Multithreading is a leaky abstraction. It sounded like there may be some use-cases where the traditional multithreading approach is superior, but for many, it sounds like the event-driven approach is not only easier to reason about and avoids many of the headaches associated with writing multithreaded code, but at least for some use cases, is demonstrably faster. That's a topic I'd like to hear more explanation and commentary on.

[cadekachelmeier]

I was surprised seeing someone talk about javascript without shitting all over it.

Then I looked at the comments.

[jamisonr]

What he says @2:40 is exactly what led me to being a "software engineer." That is, paraphrasing, that "the computer did what you told it to do" and you could see it happen immediately. For me, it was a C64 in approximately 1987/88, and the program was just changing background colors...and I thought "what if I change this value to something else?" and it worked. And I was hooked. And 30+ years later I still love it and make a nice living from it.

[Andrewzero]

"technology that happily dies out, flash!"
and I took that personally.

[betatester]

Wow, this video seriously connected some important dots for me. I will religiously watch this if it becomes a series.

[dragonbone]

This video was all over the place hahaha. Was pretty interesting to watch as a developer but I can imagine it made no sense for people that don’t know much. Was just rambling about node lol

[EricMeyerweb]

Just found this, and it was really nice to see and hear someone of David’s accomplishments and background give HTML+CSS+JS some respect in a Computerphile video. Much appreciated!

[cubbybear]

You guys should also talk about web assembly. It’s pretty interesting. Basically it allows code like C or Java to work in the browser.

[pancakerizer]

Small correction: Brailsford didn't say HTML is a *Turing complete* programming language, just that it is a programming language

[Furiends]

What he's talking about is called Chromium Embedded Framework which has a pretty crazy history that starts with a Linux desktop environment called KDE which made a highly modular web standards library called KHTML that would eventually become Safari Webkit and that inherent modularity made it an optimal choice for Chrome. There's a lot of other trends and features under pinning all this to like that web standards and open source go together like bread and butter. So eventually an open source web engine had to win out. itself forms the basis of Opera and Edge web browsers and is up one layer of abstraction from web rendering engine to entire browser framework (similar to Mozilla).

[borntolose_livetowin]

peaking my head outside my domain-specific language world, finally I understand why JavaScript is the most used programming language since a couple of years...

[KutAnimus]

It's very fitting that the restaurant and fries analogy was used, because if you eat fries too much you will get bloated.

[juzujuzu]

It's hard to imagine worse things than Chromium browser and Javascript based desktop software. Especially on software and components that are used by millions of people. The total amount of wasted resources is kind of insane.

[doombuddha]

I've been using Node for a while and every now and then I think back to PHP-GTK, which tried to accomplish the same thing about 16 years ago

[gaafts]

You've allowed me to appreciate Javascript, never heard it talked about this way. Not familiar with web technologies yet, but it never occured to me that half of everything we use are just glorified web browsers. There's a twisted beauty in the uniformity.

[mikST]

It opened backend to a lot of frontend develoers, but that comes at a cost of having often hundreds of libraries for the same purpose. The stylelint package has 500 (0.5k) packages it depends on. What a great idea.

[JWacker]

Great Video! One more important thing about Web technologies on the desktop is that it runs on pretty much any client from the same codebase and it's very easy to deploy updates.

[MoosesValley]

David is such a gently spoken and humble guy. Thank you for the very interesting video !

[philipmrch]

Well, in C# we use async and await a lot. It's very common these days, so saying that it's all synchronous and blocking is not true...