What's happening with NodeJS right now?

Albert,

This is an old quote from a HackerNews thread in 2012 in response to an article about how bad NodeJS was. NodeJS was still in its infancy then and people were frustrated with Node's lack of application, javascript's weird API, and how difficult it was to write readable asynchronous code.

NodeJS/Javascript in general has come a long way since then and has gained a huge community with thousands of libraries/frameworks and now yearly updates to push core language features. The npm registry has ~542,000 packages at the moment. NodeJS as a runtime environment has gotten faster and has been given more application thanks to awesome community driven projects like electron, react-native, etc. We now have an API for writing clean asynchronous code, libraries for automatic error handling, polyfills for bridging gaps with compatibility, etc. NodeJS is great!

Heres an example of how asynchronous programming has evolved with the new versions of ecmascript.

Old Javascript

var models = require('../models');

function getUser(req, res, next) {
  // get user id
  var uid = req.param.uid;
  // find user by id
  models.User.findById(uid, function(err, user) {
    if (err) next(err);
    else res.send(user);
  });
}

New Javascript

import { User } from '../models';

const getUser = async (req, res, next) => {
  // get user id
  const { uid } = req.param;
  // find user by id
  const user = await User.findById(uid);
  res.send(user);
};

Much simpler and easier to read, right!? Generally now, I think Javascript gets the respect it deserves. I mean take a look at how many jobs there are out there for Node developers on indeed; there's a lot of opportunity.

Hope this answers your question, Charles