Ah, certainly. In a similar manner, what I meant is that oftentimes it's the process itself that's synchronous, and if the semantics of a language or a toolkit

Ah, certainly. In a similar manner, what I meant is that oftentimes it's the process itself that's synchronous, and if the semantics of a language or a toolkit make it difficult to manipulate this sort of flow, people complain. I've done too little work with Node to have a constructive opinion on it, but I've occasionally had similar complaints about Qt, which I've used a lot more. It uses a signal-slot paradigm where you basically say "when this event is triggered, this function gets called" (in a callback-like, but somewhat more powerful and flexible fashion). It's great for a lot of things, but makes it hard to read and reason about synchronous operations that have to be fit into this form. Ultimately, though, people cope with it and write working software with it. I imagine it's the same with Node :-).