TL;DR - scroll down till you see the heading you're looking for.

I really love JavaScript as a language, and there were lots of things about NodeJS that appealed to me. So when I had the opportunity to use NodeJS on a significant project about a year ago I went for it. The app pulled data from several web services, mashed them together, and posted results and commands to other services: There was a lot of async. NodeJS should be really good at this.

After two months of serious coding I found my code was littered all over with error checking code -- not error handling code as in, "I can compensate for this error," but simple error checking code: This callback gives me an `err` as first parameter. Hmm, I guess I better not ignore it. If it's not empty I better that's set to something, and pass it to my own callback. So I end up with this All. Over. The. Place:

function getCoolResult(x, y, callback) {
   lookupSomeXData(x, function(err, xData) {
      if(err) {
        callback(err);
        return;
      }
      combineYWithXData(y, xData, function(err, coolResult) {
        if(err) {
          callback(err);
          return;
        }
        callback(null, coolResult);
   });
}

To be clear, my beef with NodeJS was that, in order to do it right, I needed those error-checking warts (two in the example above). I found myself thinking, "This is like writing C in the 90's," where one is required to check return codes after every function call.

I don't like it. I want my core business code to be really focused on business concerns, not infrastructure concerns. I want to only worry about errors that I can actually do something intelligent and contextual with.

I ran this project for two months, then decided to rewrite all the server side code in C#. I'm a consultant/contractor and the rewrite was on my own dime, so I didn't make the decision lightly. I'm really glad I did for this project, because:

1. Deleting all the error checking code felt great. Like StrongBad-cleaning-his-inbox great. Go ahead, watch that little video and imagine yourself cleansing your code of all these little error-checking warts.
2. I dropped several flakey and dubious third-party NPM packages and used built-in .NET libraries or more mature Nuget packages instead, resulting in less lines of code and a more stable app.
3. There were big chunks of code I wrote myself for node that I replaced with a third-party Nuget package. At the time I could find no NPM counter-part for some of these things.

The C# code shrunk drastically, was cleaner and more stable. Probably slower executing, but not enough to be an issue for this project.