I have made it clear that I have enjoyed Ruby and Rails till now. Obviously, Node is a big deal right now and is what the “cool kids” are using. I will not spend time on node at this time as I know that I need to focus on what I am learning. However, I have heard enough about it. I would imagine that you would need to have your head buried in the sand to not hear somethings about it.

That said, I was having a conversation with a friend learning node. He is a good developer and is adding to his toolset. In our conversation, I said,

“I just don’t understand why I should use node. I still don’t know what it is good at and the problem that it solves.”

He didn’t have a good answer for me and expressed some of the same concerns.

Everyone knows that can make a good chat app. This is always the example that I have been told to use node for, but it does not seem to really tell me that it is any better at anything else at it and you still need to tell node that it must act asynchronously. The most well known chat app WhatsApp was build using erlang. In a need for asynchronous requests, why not just go the whole way with a language like erlang? I do not have the answer and look forward to learning as node continues to grow up.

I am not one to do something just because it is the new thing. I am not saying that node is not worth learning and I may look at it myself in the future, but I will continue to try to find out why it should be used for a particular problem and may wait till I can answer this before I do spend time with it.