I agree - I think I could get away with arguing that Ruby became popular because of Rails (that may not be completely true, but I and a lot of other devs I know

I agree - I think I could get away with arguing that Ruby became popular because of Rails (that may not be completely true, but I and a lot of other devs I know learned about ruby because of rails at least). Node, OTOH, has no central framework that people learn of and then say, "oh, I have to learn node to use XYZ". There are plenty of libraries that provide whatever level of support you want, but one big reason people seem to use Node is for the ease of the DIY process. Honestly, I don't need an all-in-one system, because my system has needs that aren't easily modeled in ActiveRecord (or at least weren't during Rails 3 days when I moved over to Node). Instead, I am doing mix-and-match with smaller libraries to help database access, realtime (websocket) services, OAUTH, and a trad REST backend. I also think it's fair to compare the release of node and the release date of ruby or python - it was really only then that we can start talking about needing frameworks for building web applications that run in the javascript language, whereas the other two languages could have done so right away (or ... later, once the web application world became more than just a cgi gateway on top of a c++ stack, like the lunch menu randomizer I had running back in 1995). Still, no matter how you slice it, node and server-side javascript are still relatively new on the scene, and not necessarily well-suited for an all-in-wonder, highly-opinionated framework.