gar1t
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2012–2026
5:26 · 294K views · Jan 23, 2012
A short satirical sketch in which a Q&A about web servers turns into a profane rant about threads, blocking and non-blocking I/O. It lampoons the hype around Node.js and async programming.
HN mostly drops it as a joke in async, Node and concurrency threads, and some call it hysterically funny.
20 comments from Hacker News
> What specifically is the problem with asyncio? Watch the very NSFW (lots of swearing) but hysterically funny video "node.js is bad ass rock star tech" on youtube sometime ;). this video
If you haven't seen it, you might find this entertaining: this video I really wish gar1t would make some new videos, I love them.
>We know the java libraries are there for lots of things, but Node is all about async and handling thousands of connections. It does this by forcing the entire ecosystem to be async too (including things like database drivers). By using a Java JDBC database driver you're completely losing any async support. Same presumably goes for redis or Mongo drivers. You can do some of the work with threads and pooling, but it's still not the same, and makes this another useless micro benchmark. Sounds like you're quoting from the "Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech" satire video ( this video ). Nothing inherently special about "forcing the entire ecosystem to be async too", especially since Node is more or less FORCED to do that, because javascript is single threaded. Add the bad callback spaghetti implementation of async, and the main benefit of Node is easy deployment, and accessibility to the millions of javascript programmers. As an async environment it doesn't offer anything either new or too compelling.
Folks, why are you upvoting this? It only talks about CPU usage, Node not being Unixy enough, and Javascript being terrible. A better critique would have included talks about callback hell, or the general philosophical issues of non-block/evented work versus synchronous programming: see the classic this video . This isn't even that great a rant. (I appreciate my fellow Rails devs probably upvoting it out of spite, but c'mon...)
I disagree with the premise. I cannot imagine a better latency experience than blocking loop IDEs like VS6. Which inputs are getting latency? The keyboard? The files? > the non blocking nature this video