Hi guys, As per todays server architectures wherein its easy to scale the App servers Horizontally but DB not exactly, does this softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/171024/… still apply?

@bhuvin That quote is not advising you to put business logic into your DB. It is suggesting that you don't reinvent a DB in your application code. All the answers to that question still apply.

In the case of a horizontally scaling architecture, you have a distributed system. Those are really difficult to pull of correctly if they manipulate common state. Things like a keeping a consistent data model across distributed nodes is a really difficult problem.

Using a centralized DB is the easiest way to avoid a whole class of problems, and therefore tend to save you time and money unless you literally have too many queries per second for a single beefy DB server.

(Y)

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@amon: Javascript (ES5) is a terrible first-language, despite its ubiquity. The modern variants like Typescript and ES6 are better, but they're full-blown OO languages.

I disagree strongly. For a beginner, the total size of the language is irrelevant. But it matters how steep the learning curve is. JS makes it super simple to get started and create simple GUIs. Create a file hello.html and put <button onclick='alert("Hello World")'>Click Me!</button> inside. Your browser contains a good IDE incl. code completion, and a REPL. Those are amazing didactic opportunities! It doesn't matter that the language has some flaws and quirks.

C is a POS ancient language that forces you to deal with a command line, compilers, types, pointers, segfaults, and headers for your first program, and it doesn't get better. It's kind of elegant, and it's a great language when studying algorithms or OSes, but it's definitively beginner-hostile.

Javascript has too many terrible things about it to make it a good first language. Not sure why you think C is difficult. You can go through the pain of setting up a Linux machine and GCC if you like. Or, you can use an online compiler like repl.it. The absolute beginner can be writing C programs from day one.

But JS's flaws don't matter to a beginner. You want to build systems, but that's a completely different perspective from a beginner who wants to have fun and build cool stuff (usually games). Webdev/JS is far more conductive for that. I don't think it's useful to learn the basics first. That's just knowledge for knowledge's sake until you have the context to put it to use.

Personally, I learnt concepts like pointers and memory ownership and tree data structures through Perl, which helped a lot when I started looking at C. Perl is also a massively flawed language, but that is not a problem. It's also a massively fun language compared to Java and C# which I had tried before.

Well, C# is an incredibly fun language. Java, not so much. :)

And I'm not sure what you mean by "I don't think it's useful to learn the basics first." If you're not going to learn the fundamentals from day one, when are you going to learn them?

some time later, if I even need them. E.g. Perl has these wonderful regexes. I used them to parse some pseudo-XML. Some years later I sat in a CS 101 lecture and learned about formal languages. It suddenly made so much more sense! Now I'm a regex wizard and a PL nerd. But that doesn't invalidate the (flawed) projects I used to write. If I had learned about formal languages first, that would have been an incredibly boring lecture, and I would have forgotten those basics afterwards.

Many of the fundamentals that C could teach (like memory management) are not useful skills for most programmers. They don't always have to peek behind the curtain, and can enjoy the abstractions of whatever language they are using.

So in a way, the real question is: what are the fundamentals of software development. I don't think it's “pointers” or “types” or “semicolons and curly braces”. It's “solving problems using a computer, and enjoying it”.

^^^ @RobertHarvey could you please re-close this damaging trash to the dupe self-admitted by the asker

@amon I wouldn't exactly call regexes a fundamental, nor formal languages.

@amon You've got a point about "solving problems using a computer," though that makes a case for Python, not Javascript. And Python has some really annoying quirks of its own (double-underscores, anyone?)