I think that's still a lot of blanket judgments that programmers who can and have built other things with Node than web things, and with Perl than text monging

I think that's still a lot of blanket judgments that programmers who can and have built other things with Node than web things, and with Perl than text monging tools, have to disagree with. Node, for example, is a high-performing and fast-starting interpreter for a dynamic language with a base runtime that includes good tools for building network servers, system utilities, etc. There are many, many uses for which it's just great. So when you say that Node is "awful" for anything except "web development" it's just inviting disagreement. Why make this kind of strong value judgment about a general purpose tool?