I started as a rails developer. This is just looking at the past with rosy lens.
Given the popularity of rails at the time, if node.js was unproductive like you say it is, it would have never caught on.
The reality is that express was considerably simpler and easier than rails and that's what made many of the internet companies we have today even possible.
Node productivity changes after a few years, I can give you examples from my work from this week (no internet stories) where the npm packaging bullshit wasted my time , and I just had to hack my way for a fix and postpone the inevitability that a giant cleanup needs to be done in our dependencies.
After the sit I seen with my own eyes(not internet stories) I am convinced that there are packages like "red" that defines the color RED="#ff0000" and a package colors that depends on all colors, and probably a few big dev tools that depends on the colors one, this node/npm ecosystem is crazy but we are paid to maintain and fix other people stupidity.
EDIT forgot to mention why stuff gets complex after time,
you hit cases where you need to get a new version of package A , but A needs say a new node version or some new other shit, but you have a package B that will fail on the new node version with some stupid error, and package B was abandoned or the fix is to upgrade to a new major version... also you will notice that your packages are now abandoned and might have security issues when you inherit some old project , it is a big mess.
For some reason I inherited a project that has tons of such packages, this include popular at that time frameworks and dev tools. Din't leftpad prove that the node community was and still doing this bad thing. Sure I have the option to have 0 dependencies but if you inherit an old node project the chance the project depends on a few bad packages is 100%
Have you tried implementing a well structured and well developed migration system for node? How about a unified folder structure, best practices and patterns? Scheduled cron jobs? Templating and asset bundling? All of this came with Rails out of the box with sane defaults.
I guess I should be thankful re-inventing the wheel on all of these aspects in node has given me hundreds if not thousands of hours in compensation.
For sure. The longer somebody has been coding, the more examples they can list where the worse technology won out.
Exhibit A here is the JS language itself. It became popular not because it was the best language, just the most ubiquitous one. You could read the 25 years since as trying to turn it into a solid language.
Or look at the rise of PHP. It started out as a tool for making a Personal Home Page, which is a fine use case and was certainly a popular one in the mid/late 1990s. It eventually turned into the foundation for one of the world's largest companies. But nobody can argue it was a particularly good language. E.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
Same thing with Java, really. Bunch of interesting ideas, some of which worked out and some didn't. Even at launch a lot of the things that have turned out to be problems were criticized. They say that Java is the new COBOL, and that seems pretty fair to me.
I could go on all day. The most popular technologies are not always the best. That applies to movies and music and pretty much everything. And personally, I've accepted it. It's part of how the world works. The trick for those of us who like "better" things is to figure out how to get them to become mainstream.
When all dimensions are considered, the better thing is the thing that wins.
All the counter examples in other replies focus on one aspect of a piece of tech that was bad while completely ignoring the rest. Php might have been bad as a language but for its time, it was easier and more productive than the alternative (J2EE): the better thing won until it was supplanted by something better.
That is an error in the other direction: focusing only on a single good aspect of a piece of tech. PHP wasn't up against J2EE in that first wave, it displaced perl and cgi-bin. And the only thing it had going for it was easier deployment. Arguably first-class templating too, but I don't think that was the killer feature, and really perl wasn't that far behind. Perl had better OS support, a massive ecosystem that PHP didn't catch up with for about 15 years, and a community that actually cared about code quality. And it was renowned as a "getting stuff done" high-productivity language.
The easier deployment story for PHP3 meant you saw massive expansion at the bottom of the market as cheap webhosts were able to offer very locked-down accounts for peanuts, which meant a generation of developers came along whose only experience was with PHP. They didn't have anything to compare to and nobody was really offering them anything else at anything like the same scale. The virtualisation revolution hadn't happened yet, so these were all shared accounts on physical boxes, and they couldn't install their own stuff either.
It's just not reasonable to say PHP was "better" except in a very limited, and largely accidental sense. It just so happened that that one advantage was enough to catapult it into first place.
Is express still easier than Rails?
Im a noob and the reason I’m asking is that I’m getting somewhat stuck with a project in spring and I find their docs very fragmented and the community is more advance/intermediate or business oriented.
It’s just me building this and I have no one in my circle that’s familiar with spring.
I've been a software engineer for 32 years (I'm in management now, but I still write non-critical-path code). During my career, I've used Express, Koa, Rails, Django, Laravel, Pyramid, Sinatra, Flask, Pedestal, Luminus, Phoenix, and several other backend frameworks. If I were starting out as a "noob" today, I'd learn Elixir and Phoenix.
Given the popularity of rails at the time, if node.js was unproductive like you say it is, it would have never caught on.
The reality is that express was considerably simpler and easier than rails and that's what made many of the internet companies we have today even possible.