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By Giles Bowkett (@gilesgoatboy); via @al3x.

I read this and did a lot of head-nodding, but there something about it that didn’t sit right with me. And not just the inflammatory rhetoric. (And not just the physical disgust I feel whenever someone knocks JavaScript but fawns over CoffeeScript.) There was something else…

Fortunately, Reginald Braithwaite summarized the kernels of those feelings pretty well in his response post. (The comparison to Harlan Ellison seemed particularly apt.)

Right: it was the signal-to-noise ratio. And after reading Braithwaite’s take, I went back and re-read Bowkett’s piece, and that’s when it came to me.

Braithwaite asked:

Will Node change software developers? Or just software development?

And yes, that’s an important question. But what I came away from it with was all that thinking I’ve been doing lately about “magic” in our software patterns and practices. (“Sanity through simplicity”, right?)

And maybe that’s what he (we?) are really railing against: no one wants to write boilerplate code, and convention over configuration helps, and shiny new fast things are fun, but at a certain point you just can’t deal with the magic headaches and surprises anymore.