alt Hacker NewsI also broadly agree with the post.
> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.
Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.
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Yes, Node is boring. Its capabilities and failure modes are well understood. And no, installing today's flavour of leftpad is entirely self inflicted. Bun or Deno are definitely a token or two I'd rather spend elsewhere or not at all.
I think a good metric for "boring" technology, at least for languages/frameworks, is how painful the process of updating an abandoned/unmaintained project after 9-12 months is. NodeJS itself qualifies as boring, but the entire ecosystem around it is still a mess.
NodeJS is just an example that must have seemed reasonable to the author at the time this blog post was written (11 years ago). Obviously it may no longer apply.
Also the definitions of "unknown" and "boring" are always up to you. If you have a bunch of experienced `bun` developers in your company you may consider it as the boring tech.
It is more about being a dynamic language where V8 can only help as much, thus C++ addons, rewrites into .NET, Java, Go, Rust, and the whole npm system made of packages with single functions written by folks that just did their first package out of a bootcamp.
If it was for me, JavaScript would stay in the browser.
10 years since the original and it feels like one of the go-to de-facto standard technology choices in many organizations. So I suppose it doesn't cost an innovation token anymore, but that doesn't mean you should just use it - there are many factors to consider when picking a technology.
> Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed?
Probably not in 2026, but it 2015 it was pretty new and shiny.
I would say depends what you're trying to do?
Is NodeJS the simple, solid and rugged way this has been done for a decade now? If not, then it is an innovation.
Second it depends on what your or your teams experience level is.
Have you ever built a serious thing with it and do you have multiple years of experience running and maintaining it? Yes? Then it is probably the boring choice.
Would you be okay with leaving the final product unmaintained for a few years and it would not be a major problem? That may be a factor as well. E.g. a static HTML website needs next to zero maintenance, while a wordpress blog may fall apart every once in a while.
How maintainable would it be if the person who built it leaves? Could someone else pick up the slack right away? Would they need some time to get up to speed? Would it be literally impossible to get up to speed?
How hard is it to get the build system setup if the devs laptop is crushed under a truck? Is it as simple as cloning the project or does it need ritual sacrifice and dark chants and incantations to even get near running?
The boring thing is one that scores all the easy points on these questions.
I think calling anything in the JavaScript ecosystem “mature” is a bit of a stretch. This is the same community that brought us left-pad.
It’s pretty boring at this point.
I think that in 2026 Node is a boring technology, but with the fast-moving ecosystem around it if you opt into npm (the registry, not the package manager) it makes it not boring.
The things you layer on top of Node via npm could count as "not-boring" in this instance, especially with the number of supply-chain attacks each month.