Why is it used?

Node is weird in that you can’t really put it in most development tech boxes.

• It's not a programming language used almost exclusively for developing back-end web applications, like PHP or Ruby — though you can develop back-end web applications.
• It’s not a framework or library, though there are NodeJS frameworks and libraries — ExpressJS, and many others
• It’s not a package manager, though there are several node package managers — npm by default, as well as bower and several others.

There are 5 main things people use node for.

1. Package management through npm, bower, jspm, etc.
2. Development tooling (module management with webpack, task running and automation through grunt or gulp, linters like eslint or jslint, etc)
3. Creation of back-end web applications.
4. Command line tools like rimraf.
5. Desktop applications.

Pro's

• Javascript is one of the most commonly known programming languages, and where much of the growth in the field is taking place. Being able to write your apps front-end and back-end in the same language is truly sublime.

Cons

• The fact that node is single-threaded, though you can use web workers, can cause performance and scaling headaches for extremely large applications (especially if you don’t use streams).

Npm dependencies

NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program?

Have we forgotten how to program?

• There’s a package called isArray that has 880,000 downloads a day, and 18 million downloads in February of 2016. It has 72 dependent NPM packages. Here’s its entire 1 line of code:

  return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]';

• There’s a package called is-positive-integer (GitHub) that is 4 lines long and as of yesterday required 3 dependencies to use. The author has since refactored it to require 0 dependencies, but I have to wonder why it wasn’t that way in the first place.

• A fresh install of the Babel package includes 41,000 files

• A blank jspm/npm-based app template now starts with 28,000+ files