Continuing my tweet about Express as another data point to iron/diesel per “Teaching libraries through good documentation”—

I’m not sure I can answer your question, since I somehow learned it a few years ago, basically by cobbling enough of an understanding on how the pieces fit together for the official API docs to make sense. But Express is a superstar so there are tons of online tutorials—all of them quite bad I found 😅. There’s a very brief official “hello world” which, when I was a beginner, I ignored because it was so short, and a much longer yet much less useful page on using a project generator to get started. Occasionally when I need to throw together an Express app, I revisit the Hello World page and then look up the API docs, each time. It’s really strange, I honestly don’t know how people learn to use Express, although obviously they do…

Another example in this space is in Clojure, where a lot of people use the combination of ring (HTTP server) & compojure (routing). Dozens of plugins, like express—for anti-forgery, cookies, timeouts, JSON, &c.

Of course, for both Clojure and Node there are Rocket-like frameworks (Rails-like?), but they seem not as popular, in those ecosystems, as these hypermodular libraries. Definitely a head-scratcher for me…