My tweet last night “Node.js is the MongoDB of programming languages” got enough response I feel I need to explain it a bit. It’s an awfully snarky thing to say, but it has some truth.

MongoDB used to be the cool kids’ database. It’s appealing when you start using it: good docs, easy to get going, a plausible story on performance. NoSQL is exciting and MongoDB is an easy NoSQL system to try. But then people started looking closer and finding all the ways it broke and now MongoDB is out of favor, at least for serious production servers.

Node.js is now the cool kids programming language. It’s appealing; good docs, clean slate of libraries and tools, fast VM, and a plausible attempt at server performance. Non-blocking systems are exciting and Javascript closures make continuation programming easy. But now people are looking closer and finding all the ways Node.js is awkward or brittle and one starts to wonder.

I’m not saying Node.js is bad. There’s a lot of good in it, I particularly like that it’s made non-blocking programming more accessible than Python or Java or Nginx has. Mostly I’m just mocking the fashion of the month. It is a shame that people are rushing to this Brand New Thing without knowing the history and potential pitfalls. Just like we learned with MongoDB that ACID is hard, Node users are now discovering that reasoning about continuations is hard and memory management with closures is tricky, not to mention unwinding the stack on errors. The Node community is hard at work on improving things, hopefully that development process will lead somewhere productive.

For a more hilarious view on MongoDB and Node.js see Mongo DB Is Web Scale and Node.js is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech.