I have a project of 140,000 lines of Java + 3000 lines of JS in an Angular application. I have Maven build about 20 separate Java modules and then exec Grunt to build the Angular front-end. The build takes 2 minutes on a warm machine that has run the build before. One minute of that is Grunt. Fully half of my build time is taken up by the 2% of my codebase in Javascript. This is to “build” artifacts for a language that does not get compiled in any real sense on my end at all.

The reasons for this inefficiency are many: my 3000 line Angular program somehow drags in 300 MB of node_modules and 30 MB of bower_components; Grunt is supposedly less efficient than Gulp because it has to make a lot of disk copies; my template is probably too fancy, etc. But this is a 50x discrepancy. There must be a lot of negative multipliers combining here to lead to inefficiency like this. And that is what the software engineers of the world don’t like about Node: the whiff of amateur that pervades the system.

Maven is not a good program. It’s verbose (input and output), it inflicts XML on humans, its documentation is awful. But it has a much more appropriate level of flexibility. It has made the NRAO’s Java code a lot more maintainable. Anybody can check anything out and run mvn package to build it, mvn deploy to deploy it (well, usually). And this is what makes Maven a great program, even though it is also an awful program. It’s prescriptive and pervasive. It wouldn’t be great if it were optional.

People don’t like that Java is slow and plodding in terms of change. But let me point out that Maven was established long before Grunt was ever a thing, and off in Node.js land, they’ve already gone through Gulp and are on to Webpack and a few other build systems besides. This time next year, I’m sure webpack will be a memory and something else will have taken root. In five years, there probably will have been five or ten more Javascript “build” tools that all do less work than Maven less efficiently. And Maven will still be the de-facto build tool for Java and my packages that use it will still build the same way as they do today—with lots of unhelpful, pedantic logging; with the same bullshit in the XML file to convince Java that I don’t need compatibility with Java 1.3; with the same dependency hell that I have learned how to deal with. Because that’s what Java is like.

I don’t think Node or any other technology can be inherently bad. But, technologies can be immature, or they can foster a community that encourages amateurish (or bad, or insecure) behavior. Eventually, maybe someone falls in love with it and leads a big crusade to clean things up. Or maybe it becomes so popular that heartless buck-chasing programmers hammer on it until the old ways become unpleasant and new ways take root (this is what happened to PHP). But it feels like we’re dealing with Node.js in its awkward teenage years. A great Cambrian explosion of ideas, mostly bad ideas, playing out on npm. A lot of libraries with an air of perfunctoriness. “It connects, but there’s no error handling.” This kind of thing is upsetting to engineers, and we are mean.

The difference between Java and Javascript is very small. It’s basically that Java was designed to kidnap Unix and Windows developers and haul them off to Sun’s niche platform, whereas Javascript was designed to help high schoolers impress their long-distance girlfriend. Java has never become cool, despite squeezing out frameworks with sassy names like Play and Ninja. They’re like having a cool Dad who lets you drink a beer with him when you’re 17—it’s your senior year, after all.

Side note, a lot of the appeal of Node is that you have Javascript on the front-end and the back-end. You know, so you can pass JSON around. Is it hard to pass JSON to or from any language today? Not really. But you could have the same domain objects! But nobody really does that. The work that is done in the front-end and the back-end are different. You could make a big fat object and use it on both sides, but how are you going to avoid trying to send mail from the front-end or writing DOM nodes from the back-end? This is really about maintaining comfort. Teenage-you didn’t like hanging out with Dad’s friends. Awwwwkk-ward.

Maybe Javascript will grow up someday. Who knows? Sometimes high schoolers grow into excellent engineers. Only time will tell.