I have never known Node.JS developers to be quiet.
Quite the opposite. With a single thread, gaping security holes if you want large memory support, and until about 3 weeks ago nothing that even came close to resembling compliance with HTTP standards, the onlything Node is changing in the OpenSource community is that a crowd that would have been called script kiddies 5 years ago can now put that on a resume and for some reason think that should earn them 6 figures.
Changing the Open Source community (for the better) requires doing more than hacking together a few lines of code that dupes the functionality of someone else's lines of code. Node.JS doesn't have a single innovative project that is moving all of computer science forward. If node wants to be taken seriously it needs to prove that it can play big data, or science, or linguistics with the rest of the communities.
Every language has a niche where it dominates in resources for a given field. Node has none.
And yet it succeeds. I think it's simply that async IO is in javascript developers' blood - sure, everything you can do in node you've been able to do for five years with twisted, but if you start trying to do something in twisted all that wonderful python ecosystem is suddenly useless to you, and no-one wants to talk about creating replacements because they've all moved on to tornado or gevent or incompatible-framework-du-jour.
Because javascript started in the single-threaded execution environment of the browser, the whole ecosystem has had to be nonblocking; browser APIs were callback-oriented so the whole ecosystem has been written in callback-oriented fashion, and all the libraries play well with each other. Single-threading is a hair shirt that results in better code in the long run, like laziness in haskell. And async I/O is so much more performant than blocking (in modern application stacks) that that's making node dominate there.
I do wonder whether other languages could have ended up the same way if threading hadn't been invented. Perl always had these unreliable bodged threads, and so there were some really interesting event-driven libraries for it - but the threads were good enough for many practical uses, and AFAIK the ecosystem never converged on a single approach. Did I hear of a PEP attempting to standardise a compatible API for doing these things in python?
In web languages threading is often not the win that people think it will be. True web scale is serving 1000s of requests per minute if not second. Each of those users is a "thread" in Python, Java, Etc. So enabling multiple threads per users robs Peter to pay Paul. For this reason the Async model doesn't offer the huge performance gains in deployed code to enterprise scale, that it offers to single users trying to build fast one off projects.
You seem confused. The whole point of the async model is to allow one thread to serve many users, and it's precisely on large scale projects that this becomes useful.
Perhaps you could enlighten us about these security issues or how any language "plays big data and science". I'm genuinely curious about what you mean by security issues, even though the rest of your comment is bizzarely bitter.
Security: In order to exceed the heap limit which is quite small in node you have to override the soft limit. Doing so enables several over run attacks. Not doing so severely limits what you can do as large scale apps pretty routinely need more than the 1.4 Gig limit for even simple stuff like tracking users sessions.
Plays Big Data / Science: Python is used in a lot of science fields, Perl is huge in data mining Java is used in a lot of astronomy. Every niche of IT and CompSci has a language that is more prevalent. Even if that is FoxPro for Accounting. Node doesn't have a Niche. (sure they have chat servers that's not really a science or industry) That is what I mean by it doesn't have an area it is contributing to the advancement of a field.
Quite the opposite. With a single thread, gaping security holes if you want large memory support, and until about 3 weeks ago nothing that even came close to resembling compliance with HTTP standards, the onlything Node is changing in the OpenSource community is that a crowd that would have been called script kiddies 5 years ago can now put that on a resume and for some reason think that should earn them 6 figures.
Changing the Open Source community (for the better) requires doing more than hacking together a few lines of code that dupes the functionality of someone else's lines of code. Node.JS doesn't have a single innovative project that is moving all of computer science forward. If node wants to be taken seriously it needs to prove that it can play big data, or science, or linguistics with the rest of the communities.
Every language has a niche where it dominates in resources for a given field. Node has none.