well, quite frankly I'm not really trying to change anyone's mind, ultimately people are going to come to their own conclusions about which languages they prefe

well, quite frankly I'm not really trying to change anyone's mind, ultimately people are going to come to their own conclusions about which languages they prefer or like to work with. I don't know how anybody could see what's going on with React and not be interested, it (at least for me) took what was once a very painful process of manipulating the DOM and working with the front-end and made it into an enjoyable and streamlined process. React actually brings order to what once a very messy and insane process. I've used Node in production, it works very well for rapid prototyping. I could get a Node app up communicating with a diverse set of public APIs in minutes. It's not like Java or C# where I'm having to fumble around with a hefty IDE, a bunch of very strict typing, an entire compilation process and massively bloated web libraries. Node is a very lightweight alternative to that. I think it's kind of a shame that the JS ecosystem has such a steep learning curve, which I think is where a lot of the hate stems from but once you learn it can be quite a powerful stack.