[AlexC04]

My take on that article is that the fact that node is written in "blub" could equally be seen as an advantage.

Popularity will also mean a broad based skill set ready to work for you when it comes hiring time.

Of ever developer who's worked in Ruby, PHP, C#, Blub... they've all had to have their hands on Javascript. So this one-ring-to-rule-them-all isn't necessarily about being the best & most powerful language ... but it's the one that might be easier to hire for.

What of the social cachet attached to working in the "cool" language?

I wrote project in node and I loved it. I learned a mountain about Javascript. And in that respect, it's been a resounding success.

It has even been mildly successful running at ~1000 uniques a day, ~3000pv. In retrospect, it was absolutely the wrong tool for the job. Totally stupid. Should have used PHP & MySQL. (Or even node+mysql for that matter).

Regardless - I'm now a lot clearer on what a good use of node is vs. what a bad use is. (Hooray for deliberate professional practice).

I've read about some other languages that "already do what node says it does" - I've heard "Ruby's twisted something-or-other does that", either LISP or SCALA or something.

But I couldn't work in those languages and simultaneously increase my knowledge and understanding within my current professional practice (in a way that is directly relevant). With node/javascript I am able to get both.

I'm not actually sure if my point is very well made. It's certainly not a rebuttal to what you've said (Or even a very effective redirect for that matter).

I'd love to know more about the other stuff & the competition (as you say), but I was attracted to node. I've only got so many hours a day to program. I've got to start somewhere and picking up node (to me) seemed a really fantastic place to start.

[bad_user]

If you really want to find out about what makes Node.js tick, do yourself a favor and spend some quality time within C and the related I/O APIs, like select/poll, epoll, kqueue, AIO and all that stuff.

After that you'll have 3 revelations:

(1) everything sucks badly

(2) non-blocking I/O really is available in every platform and programming language

(3) you'll learn to appreciate older developers that have solved these problems years ago, without ranting on stupid blogs