There's probably a pot of contributing factors, but I want to point out two, as an old-fashioned c/c++ turned Java developer who moved to node and typescript.

There's probably a pot of contributing factors, but I want to point out two, as an old-fashioned c/c++ turned Java developer who moved to node and typescript. Typescript is fun. Java's type system is super unfun, with its interface-based approach to nominative typing. Of course, it has gotten better (I remember before generics, all the data structures had to have ridiculous cast statements to get stuff out). Type inference and structural are rad. Also, the javascript runtime basically has cooperative parallelism, which makes concurrency way easier to reason about. I love this fact. I think golang is going to eventually beat out node (or node will make a seismic shift in a multithreaded direction) for just this reason. Goroutines are a really good parallelism story. I don't have as much fun in go (I admit, this is a personal and ineffable metric) but it does seem to perform really well in a web socket sort of situation.