Node.js Interview: 4 Questions with Creator Ryan Dahl

My first question is "why not coroutines?!"<p>I <i>love</i> Lua (IMHO, Lua is Javascript, if JS hadn't spent its formative years huffing glue). I get where he's coming from with the "most libraries are blocking" bit, because hey, most libraries <i>ARE</i> blocking -- making a fully event-loop-centric system really is a niche case. If you want to focus on that 100%, cool, <i>use Erlang</i>, damn it. They did it right! Failing that, make a clear point of running "non-async" code externally and message-passing.<p>But I <i>really</i> don't see the point of deluding JS programmers into writing hand-written-CPS "to be asynchronous". I wish they knew better. See e.g. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150800" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150800</a>

The two most interesting points for me:<p>* JavaScript wasn't the original language choice: he originally tried C, Lua and Haskell. He especially liked Lua but "it already had a lot of libraries written with blocking code."<p>* He regrets using the CommonJS module system. ("Far too complex and wildly different from how the browser works.")